Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780385721943)

The effects of war refuse to remain local: they persist through the centuries, sometimes in unlikely ways far removed from the military arena. In Ripples of Battle, the acclaimed historian Victor Davis Hanson weaves wide-ranging military and cultural history with his unparalleled gift for battle narrative as he illuminates the centrality of war in the human experience.

The Athenian defeat at Delium in 424 BC brought tactical innovations to infantry fighting; it also assured the influence of the philosophy of Socrates, who fought well in the battle. Nearly twenty-three hundred years later, the carnage at Shiloh and the death of the brilliant Southern strategist Albert Sidney Johnson inspired a sense of fateful tragedy that would endure and stymie Southern culture for decades. The Northern victory would also bolster the reputation of William Tecumseh Sherman, and inspire Lew Wallace to pen the classic Ben Hur. And, perhaps most resonant for our time, the agony of Okinawa spurred the Japanese toward state-sanctioned suicide missions, a tactic so uncompromising and subversive, it haunts our view of non-Western combatants to this day.

Author: Victor Davis Hanson
ISBN-10: 0385721943
ISBN-13: 9780385721943
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 10/12/2004
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 8.04h x 5.26w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 12/19/2004 pg. 30