John Keegan is the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998, he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle, Six Armies in Normandy, Battle at Sea, The Second World War, A History of Warfare (awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), Warpaths, The Battle for History, The First World War, and most recently, Intelligence in War. For many years John Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and he has been a Fellow of Princeton University and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received the OBE in the Gulf War honours list, and was knighted in the Millennium honours list in 1999. John Keegan died in August 2012.
"John Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of
military historians... His book is a work of massive sweep...the
most remarkable study of warfare that has yet been written."
*New York Times Review of Books*
Keegan adds to his reputation as a writer of military history ( The Second World War , LJ 11/1/89, among others) with this wide-ranging and provocative volume. While he believes that humankind is not doomed to make war, he recognizes that the world's written history is largely a history of warfare. Warfare in turn reflects culture. For instance, Asian war making is characterized by patterns of delay, evasion, and indirection and an ethic of limitation based on Confucian and Islamic ideals. Western culture, on the other hand, incorporates a moral element of face-to-face battle to the death and a technological bias toward constant innovations in weaponry. These factors have combined to generate the total wars that are often considered the norm of conflict. Keegan's emphases on restraint and ritual in war, and on the importance of separating it from politics, challenge conventional wisdom in a way that makes this work essential for all public and private collections on the subject.-- D.E. Showalter, Colorado Coll., Colorado Springs
In his sweeping new study, Keegan ( The Face of Battle ) examines the origins and nature of warfare, the ethos of the primitive and modern warrior and the development of weapons and defenses from the battle of Megiddo (1469 B.C.) into the nuclear age. Keegan offers a refreshingly original and challenging perspective. He characterizes warriors as the protectors of civilization rather than as its enemy and maintains that warfare is ``entirely a masculine activity.'' Though warfare has become an ingrained practice over the course of 4000 years, he argues, its manifestation in the primitive world was circumscribed by ritual and ceremony that often embodied restraint, diplomacy and negotiation. Peacekeepers, he suggests, would benefit from studying primitive warmaking--especially now, ``a time when the war of all against all already confronts us.'' A masterwork. Photos. 40,000 first printing; History Book Club main selection; BOMC alternate. (Nov.)
"John Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of military historians... His book is a work of massive sweep...the most remarkable study of warfare that has yet been written." -- Michael Howard * New York Times Review of Books *
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