John Keegan
"Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of living...
The greatest military historian of our time gives a peerless account of America’s most bloody, wrenching, and eternally fascinating war.
In this magesterial history and national bestseller, John Keegan shares his original and perceptive insights into the psychology, ideology, demographics, and economics of the American Civil War. Illuminated by Keegan’s knowledge of military history he provides a fascinating look at how command and
Fields of Battle spans more than two centuries and the expanse of a continent to show how the immense spaces of North America shaped the wars that were fought...
In this major and wholly original contribution to military history, John Keegan reverses the usual convention of writing about war in terms of generals and nations in conflict, which tends to leave the common soldier as cipher. Instead, he focuses on what a set battle is like for the man in the thick of it—his fears, his wounds and their treatment, the mechanics of being taken prisoner, the nature of leadership at the most junior level, the
...In a burnished, driving prose, John Keegan chronicles the 1944 invasion of Normandy, from D-Day to the liberation of Paris. At the same time, he furthers his exploration of the "role which warfare and its institutions play in social life", by showing how each of the six armies, while resembling one another in purpose and authority, is a mirror of its own nation's values. Each army is shown at successive stages of the invasion in a battle sequence
...Intelligence gathering is an immensely complicated and vulnerable endeavor. And it often fails. Until the invention of the telegraph and radio, information often traveled no faster than a horse could ride, yet intelligence helped defeat Napoleon. In the twentieth century, photo analysts didn’t recognize...
The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian...
8) The Iraq war
Is war a natural condition of humankind? What are the origins of war? Is the modern state dependent...