The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

Book Overview

New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hunter combines the raw grittiness of 1945 Iwo Jima with the mystique of the samurai culture to create his best thriller to date.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743238095
• ISBN13: 9780743238090
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Author Stephen Hunter is awesome

Absolutely wonderful A truly must read!

Good action novel.

Another Bob Lee Swagger novel, this one incorporating some "history" of his father on Iwo Jima. Another good movie in the making.

a great read!!

absolutely a great book! the author really researched his sword techniques. i could not put this book down! this was a great book to start reading my first stephan hunter novel i have bought 2 more books since this one!

Hunter at His Finest

If you loved Point of Impact, stop whatever you are doing, get Stephen Hunter's latest novel, The 47th Samurai, and start reading. Before you begin, however, repeat after me: Swords not guns. Swords not guns. Swords not guns. Bob Lee Swagger has moved on to new challenges, as any hero must. This time he takes up the sword and enters the world of the samurai, sent there by the legacy of his father and propelled by his own flinty sense of honor. Hunter's writing is as graceful, powerful and revelatory as ever. His words pick you up in the first sentence and don't put you down until the last. There's plenty of violence here, but somehow the reverence for the sword suffuses it with an experience that goes beyond blood and guts. Read this book. Swords not guns. Swords not guns....

Moon in the cold stream like a mirror.

Although wholly different than the other installments of the Bob Lee Swagger series it has the same vibe and the same man we all grew to love and respect. If you only read these books for the vivid gun fights you will have to trade in your pistols for the samurai sword. This book has done for the samurai sword what the other volumes have done for the Remington 700, 1911, and Tommy gun. Very few guns can be found in this tome as the violence is on a much more personal level. This doesn't take away from the action or the Swagger intensity that we have grown to love. Over all this is another great installment to the Swagger family chronicals and I look forward to the next adventure. Bob Lee and Earl are the men we want to be and we want around when the going get's tough. They are our Spartans standing watch at the gate of right and wrong. Although different it is just as worthy of praise as the other books from Stephen Hunter.

Hunter's best yet.

I've read every Bob Lee Swagger book, and all but one of the Earl Lee Swagger series. Every book has been great, and at the end of each I have thought, This is definitely Hunter's best book yet. And in fact, I'm pretty sure I would have thought the same thing no matter what order I read the books, but the truth is, this is definitely the best Hunter has written. The review ahead of mine (currently the only review of the book so far) mentions that the allure of Bob Lee Swagger is his marksmanship and the technique that goes along with being a sniper. While this is true, the previous books have been highly dependent on his sniper skills, the true heart of each story was not the sniper-Bob Lee, but the hero Bob Lee. And in The 47th Samurai, while the sniper does not return, the hero does. And the hero in this story has more heart, and more compassion than I've seen in any of the other Bob Lee Swagger books. Perhaps Bob Lee couldn't have been such a quick learn as a Samurai, maybe that's pushing what's possible to the edge, but then again, if every thriller was written purely in the realm of the possible, then we would have no thrillers. This book is brilliantly written, well thought-out, and quick-paced. It will keep any reader thrilled, whether a Bob Lee fan or not. This is a truly great thriller, but also a book that played at my heart-string more than I thought a thriller could. Buy this book and read it, I promise you will not be sorry.