A History of Warfare

Brilliant. A cultural history of war from antiquity to the present day in a single volume. Keegan starts with the symbolic forms of war among the so called "primitives," including those from the neolithic, using much archaeological evidence to do so. He then moves on to the advent of the chariot by......more

Some of the most obfuscating, impenetrable prose I've ever come across. I read it in high school, and I remember at the time being half of the opinion that it was my own fault as an inexperienced reader. It was a much delayed vindication when I read Steven Pinker's guide to clear writing, 'The Sense......more

Renowned military historian John Keegan succeeds admirably in the difficult task of providing a coherent narrative for humanity's age-old proclivity for armed conflict. From Assyrian charioteers to the advent of the machine gun and the world destroying potential of the nuclear age, this is something......more

I’m usually ambivalent toward single-volume histories of a topic, but this one hits the spot. Professorial without being didactic, really eye-opening paradigms. The difference between Indo-European and Turkic orders of battle clarifies so many encounters. Slightly dated by its insistence that with t......more