A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson
A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson
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A War Like No Other
How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Narrator: Bob Souer

Unabridged: 13 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/22/2019


Synopsis

Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other.

Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and non-conventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato.

Hanson's perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises many thought-provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it more like America's own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the fabric of a glorious society, or even this century's schism between liberals and conservatives? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often-surprising ways in which the past informs the present.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of more than two dozen books, ranging in topics from ancient Greece to modern America, including The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. He lives in Selma, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Erik on June 02, 2013

Having enjoyed another book by Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle, I picked this one up when a copy was put up for sale at the Hayward, Wisconsin Public Library over the Memorial Day weekend. Since reading Thucydides freshman year at Grinnell College, the history of the Peloponnesian War has he......more

Goodreads review by David on April 08, 2021

This book put ancient Greece into an entirely new light for me. The war was sporadic, but altogether lasted about 30 years. Athens was the great democracy, with a large empire of states it had conquered. Athens was the technologically superior Greek state. It relied on its advanced navy with better......more

Goodreads review by paper0r0ss0 on March 09, 2022

Una guerra tra superpotenze, forse la prima guerra civile occidentale, considerando la medesima matrice culturale e storica: Sparta contro Atene, 431-404 a.C., quasi trent'anni di guerra, imboscate, battaglie campali, scontri navali, epidemie, ma soprattutto assedi alle citta, massacri indiscriminat......more

Goodreads review by Adam on January 15, 2019

Hanson gives us an accessible account of the ancient conflict between democracy & oligarchy-- recommended for any student of military history.......more

Goodreads review by Bob on July 07, 2021

Summary: An account of the Peloponnesian War tracing the history, the politics, the strategies, key figures, battles, and how the war was fought. The war went on for twenty-seven years toward the end of the fifth century BC. One of the first great works of history by Thucydides chronicled the battle.......more