New Releases by Victor Davis Hanson

This brilliant account covers a millennium of Greek warfare. With specially commissioned battle maps and vivid illustrations, Victor Davis Hanson takes the reader into the heart of Greek warfare, classical beliefs, and heroic battles. This colorful portrait of ancient Greek culture explains why their approach to fighting was so ruthless and so successful. Development of the Greek city-state and the rivalries of Athens and Sparta. Rise of Alexander the Great and the Hellenization of the Western world. Famous thinkers—Sophocles, Socrates, Demosthenes—who each faced his opponent in battle, armed with spear and shield. Unsurpassed military theories that still influence the structure of armies and the military today.

Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence–and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot. Such a consideration of the Cold War–as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones–is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume’s contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in “The War Scare of 1983,” shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers “The Right Man,” his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions. The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer’s “The Berlin Tunnel,” which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative “Big Bill” Harvey’s effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines–and the Soviets’ equally audacious reaction to the plan; while “The Truth About Overflights,” by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War’s best-kept secrets. The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in “MIA” by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war’s “front lines”–Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs–as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others. Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.

One of our most provocative military historians, 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. Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present. 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 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 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 “red state—blue state” schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present. Brilliantly researched, dynamically written, A War Like No Other is like no other history of this important war.

Son m ltiples las teor as que tratan de explicar la presencia dominante de la cultura occidental por todo el mundo, desde las que hablan de una superioridad gen tica hasta las que tienen en cuenta un mayor desarrollo tecnol gico. Ahora, el autor aporta un nuevo argumento: los occidentales son m s eficaces; y recrea nueve batallas hist ricas entre ej rcitos occidentales y no occidentales, como la victoria griega de Salamina en el 480 a.C., la conquista de la ciudad de M xico por Cort s en 1521 o la Guerra de Vietnam, y perfila las caracter sticas de los ej rcitos de Occidente Para buscar las claves de su dominio en valores culturales como el individualismo, la disciplina o la capacidad organizativa.

The effects of war refuse to remain local: they persist through the centuries, sometimes in unlikely ways far removed from the military arena. In Ripples of Battle, the acclaimed historian Victor Davis Hanson weaves wide-ranging military and cultural history with his unparalleled gift for battle narrative as he illuminates the centrality of war in the human experience. The Athenian defeat at Delium in 424 BC brought tactical innovations to infantry fighting; it also assured the influence of the philosophy of Socrates, who fought well in the battle. Nearly twenty-three hundred years later, the carnage at Shiloh and the death of the brilliant Southern strategist Albert Sidney Johnson inspired a sense of fateful tragedy that would endure and stymie Southern culture for decades. The Northern victory would also bolster the reputation of William Tecumseh Sherman, and inspire Lew Wallace to pen the classic Ben Hur. And, perhaps most resonant for our time, the agony of Okinawa spurred the Japanese toward state-sanctioned suicide missions, a tactic so uncompromising and subversive, it haunts our view of non-Western combatants to this day.

In his acclaimed collection An Autumn of War, the scholar and military historian Victor Davis Hanson expressed powerful and provocative views of September 11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan. Now, in these challenging new essays, he examines the world''s ongoing war on terrorism, from America to Iraq, from Europe to Israel, and beyond. In direct language, Hanson portrays an America making progress against Islamic fundamentalism but hampered by the self-hatred of elite academics at home and the cynical self-interest of allies abroad. He sees a new and urgent struggle of evil against good, one that can fail only if "we convince ourselves that our enemies fight because of something we, rather than they, did." Whether it''s a clear-cut defense of Israel as a secular democracy, a denunciation of how the U.N. undermines the U.S., a plea to drastically alter our alliance with Saudi Arabia, or a perception that postwar Iraq is reaching a dangerous tipping point, Hanson''s arguments have the shock of candor and the fire of conviction.

''Why The West Has Won'' provides a history of the rise to dominance of the West, exploring the links between cultural values and military success.

Hanson thinks the ancient Greeks deliberately made warfare physically and psychologically intolerable so that no one could stand it for long and wars could be fought and settled in a single afternoon.

Before storms that can destroy his crops in an instant, the farmer stands implacable. To fluctuations in temperature that can deprive his children of their future, the farmer pays no heed. Every day the elements remind him that his future is secure only through constant effort. Like the creepers and crawlers he seeks to eradicate, the farmer toils away in the lush anonymity of his grid of vines, his tradition one of impervious resolve.

Victor Hanson shows that the "Greek revolution" was not the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm."--BOOK JACKET.

From the author of the international bestseller "The Western Way of War" comes a fresh, exciting look at three armies whose intense spirit of mission, coupled with the genius of their leaders, led them to triumph. Maps.

Quand on évoque l''héritage de la Grèce antique, on entend les mots architecture, sculpture, science, philosophie, poésie, politique... rarement art militaire ou guerres. Or celles-ci sont au cœur de leur histoire et de notre héritage. Peu de cultures furent aussi belliqueuses que les cités-Etats de la Grèce antique tout en étant aussi peu militarisées. Chaque temple grec montre sur son fronton et ses frises les dieux en tenue d''hoplite les vases glorifient les rangs de la phalange ; les stèles représentent les morts en soldats d''infanterie. Platon utilise souvent le modèle de la guerre pour illustrer ses théories de la vertu et de la connaissance et emprunte fréquemment ses exemples à l''expérience personnelle de Socrate. Pour Hérodote, Thucydide ou Xénophon, il était apparemment inconcevable de relater autre chose. D''après Héraclite, "les âmes tuées au combat sont plus pures que celles qui meurent de maladie". Pour Socrate, tuer des hommes en guerroyant pour Athènes ne s''opposait pas à la pratique de la dialectique ou de la réflexion abstraite. Cet ouvrage met en scène et en image, de façon vivante et accessible, l''évolution sur un millénaire de cette culture, de ce modèle, de ces pratiques militaires, mélange unique d''avance technologique, de pensée stratégique et de cohésion avec les valeurs citoyennes. La guerre s''inscrit ici dans le prolongement de la société.

The ancient Greeks were for the most part a rural, not an urban, society. And for much of the Classical period, war was more common than peace. Almost all accounts of ancient history assume that farming and fighting were critical events in the lives of the citizenry. Yet never before have we had a comprehensive modern study of the relationship between agriculture and warfare in the Greek world. In this completely revised edition of Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, Victor Davis Hanson provides a systematic review of Greek agriculture and warfare and describes the relationship between these two important aspects of life in ancient communities. With careful attention to agronomic as well as military details, this well-written, thoroughly researched study reveals the remarkable resilience of those farmland communities. In the past, scholars have assumed that the agricultural infrastructure of ancient society was often ruined by attack, as, for example, Athens was relegated to poverty in the aftermath of the Persian and later Peloponnesian invasions. Hanson''s study shows, however, that in reality attacks on agriculture rarely resulted in famines or permanent agrarian depression. Trees and vines are hard to destroy, and grainfields are only briefly vulnerable to torching. In addition, ancient armies were rather inefficient systematic ravagers and instead used other tactics, such as occupying their enemies'' farms to incite infantry battle. Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece suggests that for all ancient societies, rural depression and desolation came about from more subtle phenomena—taxes, changes in political and social structure, and new cultural values—rather than from destructive warfare.

During the 1980s, 2,000 family farms went out of business every week. Fields Without Dreams tells Hanson''s passionate, angry, loving, and lyrical story. A fifth-generation California vine and fruit grower, Hanson and his family faced an overwhelming personal crisis when the great "raisin boom" of the 1970s was followed by the great "raisin crash" of the 1980s.

Les Grecs de l''age classique n''ont pas seulement invente l''idee centrale de la politique occidentale - la democratie - mais aussi le fait central de la guerre en Occident - la bataille rangee d''infanterie. Le but est identique: obtenir un resultat definitif et incontestable de la facon la plus directe et la plus efficace possible - le vote majoritaire pour la democratie, le combat face a face des hoplites pour la guerre. Appliquant a l''examen des textes et de l''armement anciens une pensee totalement novatrice, Victor Hanson nous revele ainsi l''ethique profonde de ce mode de combat ne dans les plaines de l''Attique et qui allait devenir pour des siecles, jusqu''au conflit du Viet Nam et meme si la lecon en a ete mal comprise - le modele occidental de la guerre. Victor Hanson nous fait aussi partager, minute par minute, ce que ressentait le combattant pris dans cet affrontement effroyable ou, dans chaque camp, des milliers d''hommes poussaient vers l''adversaire ceux du premier rang, vers un carnage d''une hallucinante violence qui ne s''achevait que lorsqu''un parti rompait ses lignes dans une mortelle debandade.Victor Hanson, ne en 1953, est professeur a l''Universite de Californie.