Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think » (Reprint)

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian who is a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno. He has written several scholarly and popular books on ancient history and classical warfare, including The Other Greeks, The Western Way of War, and The Soul of Battle. He lives in Selma, California.

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.

The Washington Post

[Hanson] has written his new book decidedly under the shadow of a new kind of warfare: that launched on Sept. 11, 2001. He addresses particularly the question of whether suicidal zealots have an advantage over those who, like most Americans, engage in battle in such a way as to try to save lives while seeking victory. He expresses confidence that those who fight to live as well as to win have an advantage. They do so especially when they have at their disposal the military power of the United States: The historical record shows that Americans, when enraged, bring to conflict a devastating fury. — Russell F. Weigley