Critical Compendium » Military history

Almost a Miracle, by John Ferling

“John Ferling toiled for years in relative obscurity at West Georgia University, churning out at least nine books, dozens of articles, and uncounted reviews, almost all dealing with war and politics in eighteenth-century America, the same subjects that have brought fame and riches to Joseph Ellis, David Hackett Fischer, and David McCullough. His prose may lack the elegance of Ellis’s or McCullough’s, and he may not have plumbed the depths of manuscript evidence as Fischer has done, but his work is solid–clear, sensible, and intellectually nourishing. His most recent book, a 575-page, detailed narrative of the American Revolutionary War, is a personal masterpiece.” Read the review at Michigan War Studies Review.

Filed under: History, Military history, Nonfiction | Posted 02.29.08 | Comments: None

The Trojan War: A New History, by Barry Straus

“In his “New History,” Barry Strauss tells the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning. Paris, the “cosmopolitan prince” from Troy, abducted the unhappy Helen in Sparta, not for love but for political reasons. Strauss sees the adulterous couple as “less like Romeo and Juliet than Juan and Eva Péron.” Helen escaped Sparta, and Paris “carried out a bloodless raid on enemy territory.” The war ignited in this way between two mighty powers, Troy and Greece, had been looming for a long time because “Troy invites war.” Read the review at Michigan War Studies Review.

Filed under: History, Military history, Nonfiction | Posted 01.25.08 | Comments: None

The Ghost Mountain Boys, by James Campbell

“Sometimes you see it said in a fiction review that the geographical setting is as much of a character in the novel as, well, the characters. It seems this observation can be extended to nonfiction, as well, for in James Campbell’s superb “The Ghost Mountain Boys,” the island of New Guinea is one of the most fearsome characters you will ever want to come across, in fiction or real life. The Ghost Mountain Boys were the men of 2nd Battalion, 32nd Infantry Division, who made an appallingly grueling trek in late 1942 from near Port Moresby on the south coast of New Guinea, across the Owen Stanley Mountains, to do battle with the Japanese solidly entrenched at Buna on the north coast. Campbell, author of “The Final Frontiersman,” ably explains how they did it — they did it with excruciating difficulty. Why they ever were made to do it is another question entirely.” Read the review at the Denver Post.

Filed under: History, Military history, Nonfiction | Posted 01.18.08 | Comments: None

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust

‘Amazon.com lists more than 36,000 books on the American Civil War, and my guess is that most of them depict battles and heroes, and describe wartime deaths as noble and tragic. Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” does something different. It’s a shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying — how Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it.’ Read the review at the Los Angeles Times.

Filed under: History, Military history, Nonfiction | Posted 01.09.08 | Comments: 1 Comment

Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, by Chris Bellamy

‘On Aug. 11, 1941, as massed German armies were advancing on Moscow, Colonel-General Franz Halder, chief of the Nazi general staff, wrote in his diary that “we have underestimated the Soviet colossus.” Since the German invasion had begun, some seven weeks before, the unprepared Soviets had been steadily pushed back toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, and had already suffered more than two million casualties. “But,” wrote Halder, “there they are. . .” “The ferocity of the Soviet resistance,” writes British military historian and war correspondent Chris Bellamy, became a key factor in “the most absolute war ever fought,” a war marked by “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; the play of chance and probability; and [its] political direction . . . If you want to understand war,” writes Bellamy, “study this one.’ Read the review at the Boston Globe.

Filed under: History, Military history, Nonfiction | Posted 11.27.07 | Comments: None