J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010)
Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yardon ...
18 Feb 20111h 7min
Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler tha...
3 Dec 20101h 21min
Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941” (Basic Books, 2010)
In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two remarka...
12 Nov 20101h 1min
Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010)
Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might we...
27 Aug 20101h 5min
Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” (Oxford UP, 2010)
In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the ho...
23 Juli 20101h 3min
Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006)
Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we ...
15 Juli 201053min
John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wonder,...
9 Juli 20101h 11min
Michael Kranish, “Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into you...
1 Juli 201058min
