July 14, 2006

Gratuitous Llama Book Review

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A War like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War by Victor Davis Hanson.

I'm still only half way through this book, but I nonetheless feel that I can sum up my opinion of it now.

As regular readers know, I'm a great fan of Hanson. I read his articles in NRO and elsewhere all the time. I thoroughly agree with most of his GWOT analyses. I am an enthusiastic supporter of his arguments that Jarod Diamond's theories that Western cultural hegemony is based on environmental resources aren't worth a load of fetid dingo's kidneys.

In addition, I have a number of his other books on military history in general (Ripples of Battle and Carnage and Culture), as well as Classical Greek warfare in particular (The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Landmark Thucydides, for which VDH wrote the introduction). The man obviously knows and loves his subject.

In short, I like Hanson's work.

Which makes it all the more painful to say this: AWLNO, although meticulously researched and full of fascinating information, is in need of some serious. serious editing. It is rambling and repetitive. It skips and wanders, sometimes hammering on a point and sometimes setting one up but never making it. Chapters and sections sometimes just seem to stop, without any particular conclusion being drawn. Even individual paragraphs shift course midway through.

Also, it seems as if VDH never quite decided whether this was going to be simply a detailed account of the Peloponnesian Wars or a more expansive discourse on the parallels between those wars and modern military questions. He certainly sets out a number of relevant subject areas - armor, terrorism, guerrilla tactics, mission creep and home-front morale, for example - but while examining them in depth in his Greek examples, he only throws in the occassional modern reference here and there. It strikes me he should either have expanded on these or else taken them out of the text altogether.

In short, while this book is extremely interesting, it reads to me much like a work in progress, an advanced rough draft that still has several rewrite cycles to get through before it emerges as the polished final product it could be.

Will I finish it? Sure. But I'll do so for the subject matter, not the presentation.

Posted by Robert at July 14, 2006 10:34 AM | TrackBack
Comments

As for a presentation of the Peloponnesian War it is really hard to beat Thucydides....

Posted by: Zendo Deb at July 14, 2006 11:49 AM

I have a degree in history, and I never found the Peloponnesian War interesting.

I figured out it's because I really hate city states. The same thing ruins the Quattrocento for me in Italian history. All the petty carping and interminable vendettas. All so small scale and vindictive.

City states are a plague on history.

Posted by: The Colossus at July 14, 2006 01:04 PM

Colossus - how about early Rome? All that raping of Sabines and that pesky Lars Porsena to deal with.....

Posted by: Robbo the LB at July 14, 2006 03:30 PM

The difference is that Rome overcame all of that. They started out as a crappy little city state and then made something of themselves.

Not like those loser Athenians.

Posted by: The Colossus at July 14, 2006 07:54 PM