A War Like No Other
"Hanson 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 nonconventional 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 philosophers including Sophocles and Plato." "Hanson's analysis of events and personalities raises many questions: Were Athens and Sparta like the United States and the Soviet Union, 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 "red state-blue state" schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present."--Jacket.
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What Hacker News says
- Since you mentioned the Greeks, anyone with the slightest interest in Ancient Greece should read “A War Like No Other” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a fascinating account of the Peloponnesian War. There’s a chapter on siege warfare.
- To be fair, pure democracy in Athens led to all kind of disasters as the crowd was easily swayed by demagogues like Alcibiades, leading to disastrous foreign adventures like the sicillian expedition in the Peloponnesian war (A war like no other is a great book on this). It's hardly a model we should emulate.
I prefer the mediated kind of democracy (in spite of the tendency to oligarchy) as at least it tempers the rule of the mob.
- Victor Davis Hanson, through hard work and luck, has parlayed his Stanford Classics PhD into a successful career as classicist, military historian, columnist, and conservative pundit. I just finished A War Like no Other http://www.amazon.com/War-Like-Other-Athenians-Peloponnesian... which I recommend, but I don't think it's odd for him to write this. Even with hard work most folks with liberal arts degrees won't see much success in liberal arts endeavors, but more specifically I think he was referring to farming, which is a side hobby for him and liberal arts degrees in his family did not contribute to success with the family homestead.
