All Posts
Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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Few armed conflicts in history have be shorter, more decisive, or more consequential than the Six Day War of June 1967. Over the course of just 132 hours the tiny upstart state of Israel conquered 42,000 square miles, including the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria,…
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I picked up David Eltis’ “The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe” out of a clearance bin at Barnes & Noble many years ago. It remained buried and forgotten in a corner of my home library until I stumbled upon it after reading about naval innovation around the same period. It was a fortuitous find and…
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Stacy Schiff is one of my favorite living historians. Another is Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Alexander Hamilton.” Here is what Chernow has to say about Schiff: “Even if forced at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence.” It’s true; Schiff has the unique ability…
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Erich von Manstein was considered by his peers as the most talented general officer in the German army. His celebrated Second World War memoir, “Lost Victories,” chronicles his exploits, frustrations, victories and defeats as a chief of staff in Poland in 1939, commander of 38th Corps in France in 1940, 56th Panzer Corps during the…
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The Cleopatra most of us know is a fictional creation. The story we know comes mainly from the early first century Roman writers Plutarch and Dio. According to author Stacy Schiff, that’s like reading a history of twentieth-century America written by Chairman Mao. In short, our image of Cleopatra is “the joint creation of Roman…
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“He was the first martyr of free speech and free thought.” So claims I.F. Stone in this 1988 bestseller about the trial and execution of Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, in 399 BC. Thirty years after its initial publication, the relevance of the story has never been greater. In a world of campus safe spaces,…
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Barry Strauss is a world-class academic classicist, but “The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece — and Western Civilization” is geared for the more general reader. He tells the story of the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BC and the decisive naval battle at Salamis with an easy style focused on…
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The final installment in Alistair Horne’s epic trilogy on the Franco-German military rivalry, “To Lose a Battle: France 1940” is by far the longest and most tactically detailed of the three. The book is broken into two parts. The first, covering about a third of the book, chronicles the political turmoil and military missteps in…
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They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. The same could even be said for its title. Paul Rahe’s latest effort, “The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge,” is an excellent book, it just doesn’t have all that much to do with the grand strategy of classical Sparta. Rather, it is…
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