I learned of this book reading The Peacemaker’s Code: Malhotra’s novel includes some of the peacekeeping concepts from The Causes of War.
Blainey’s main idea is that a major factor in war is a country being very optimistic about their chances of winning a war. And the problem there is that people often have distorted, overly optimistic ideas about their own abilities. They may not understand how much pain they and the people they care about might really be in for. Optimism can be deadly.
Blainey’s book is also great for learning about world history. And Blainey is frequently very funny: if every history book was this entertaining, you’d have a lot more people into history.
The third edition of Geoffery Blainey’s highly acclaimed study on the causes of war has been expanded and updated to include a complete discussion of World War II and the road towards nuclear war.
Analyzing all international wars since 1700, Causes of War solves the riddle of why some wars are long and some are short and demonstrates how the “outbreak of peace” offers insight into the outbreak of war.
Proving that war and peace are alternating phases of a relationship between rival nations, this widely quoted work offers a crucial, new understanding of international armed conflict.
I have a strong, if contrarian, interest in modern history, Asian history in particular. I have published more than a dozen articles and book reviews on the subject, and I have taught courses on modern Asian history (China, Japan, Vietnam, India) at New York University, where I have been a professor since 1968. A brief history of my somewhat unusual academic career may be found in a 50-page memoir published via Amazon in 2020 together with an appendix containing a sampling of my short writings. It is titled Moss Roberts: A Journey to the East. The memoir but not the appendix is free via Researchgate. In addition, I have studied (and taught) the Chinese language for more than half a century, and published translations of classical works of literature and philosophy.
Important for Japan’s shifting policy in China, but also for the responses in China and in Russia. Identifies key figures in the military responsible for war planning and their conflicts as well as the role of the emperor. This book emphasizes the twisting path toward Pearl Harbor and how it might have been avoided.
The book explores the critical importance of Pan-Asianism in Japanese imperialism. Pan-Asianism was a cultural as well as political ideology that promoted Asian unity and recognition. The focus is on Pan-Asianism as a propeller behind Japan's expansionist policies from the Manchurian Incident until the end of the Pacific War.
I have a passion for this theme because I served as an armor officer in the U.S. Army for more than twenty years. I saw the effect of both thinking and non-thinking commanders first-hand in places like the inter-German border during the Cold War, Iraq in combat during the first Gulf War, and Bosnia in ‘operations other than war.’ My experience drove me to continue my military studies resulting in four degrees, including my PhD and my current occupation as a professor of military history. My search for understanding war and military decision-making reflects a desire to better instruct the future leaders among my college students and readers.
I probably have referred to this work more than any other in my personal library of several thousand books. This original hardback covers more than thirteen wars in hundreds of detailed maps. Later hardback and online editions have added all major conflicts from the Korean War to the recent war in Afghanistan. Patton once said that terrain is the skeleton upon which we flesh out our plans and operations. I believe no historian can understand battles and campaigns without first understanding the terrain. These maps make it possible to see the restraints and constraints imposed by terrain and give the possibility for the trained eye to retrospectively measure the coup de oeilin their subject’s eye. All military history begins with a map and the maps begin here.
Gerhard Weinberg fled Germany at the end of 1938 and experienced the first year of World War II – including the beginning of the Blitz – in England. He completed his PhD after serving in the US Army of Occupation in Japan, researched the captured German documents, established the program for microfilming them, and after writing an analysis of the origins of World War II decided to prepare a book covering the war as a whole.
In view of the numerous controversies and varied views of General MacArthur’s actions and policies in the Pacific War, it is great to have a balanced and very carefully researched and presented account of a commander who was in it from Japan’s attack on the United States to Japan’s surrender. While dealing fairly with some of the criticisms of the general, Borneman does note his repeated announcements of battles being ended when they were not as well as the hopeless incompetence of his intelligence chief.
World War II changed the course of history. Douglas MacArthur changed the course of World War II. MACARTHUR AT WAR will go deeper into this transformative period of his life than previous biographies, drilling into the military strategy that Walter R. Borneman is so skilled at conveying, and exploring how personality and ego translate into military successes and failures.
Architect of stunning triumphs and inexplicable defeats, General MacArthur is the most intriguing military leader of the twentieth century. There was never any middle ground with MacArthur. This in-depth study of the most critical period of his career shows how MacArthur's…
My passion for the Battle of Crete flows from my traveler’s experiences of this most beautiful of Mediterranean islands and its people. The Second World War is just one episode in a history that stretches back millennia, yet to this day, it remains ever-present in the minds of Cretans. The landscape, too, still bears the scars of war. Every visitor to Crete has the opportunity to uncover the multiple layers of a rich past. To dig down to the horrors of the twentieth century with its brutal war and occupation does not take long, and it is enormously rewarding. In few places are past and present so closely intertwined.
As an Australian, I am struck by the silence around the Battle of Crete and other campaigns in that part of the world. In stark contrast to our neighbors across the Tasman, for Australia, the Second World War was all about the war in the Pacific.
This book by the Australian military historian Albert Palazzo, published in an Australian Army Campaign series, is not simply an Australian perspective on the Battle of Crete, but it does foreground the Australian contribution. What appeals to me also is the rich array of visual material it presents, often in full color, from photographs and maps to Orders of Battle, Chains of Command, and weapons.
All of this is complemented by expert knowledge from a historian who knows his strategy, his tactics, and his hardware.
Between 20 May and 1 June 1941 the Second World War came to the Greek island of Crete. The Commonwealth defenders consisted of Australian, New Zealand and British refugees from the doomed Greek Campaign who had not recovered from defeat.
I recently retired as a military and naval history professor at the University of Memphis, where I continue to teach strategy for the US Naval War College. I am the author of seven books and many articles on maritime and military history and the histories of technology and sexuality.
Assigned to students at every American war college, this book offers a chronological and thorough examination of changing strategic thought over the last 500 years. It describes important theorists and ideas, how these developed over time, and how they shaped the planning and conduct of modern warfare. Most importantly, it underlines the relationships among different strategic theorists and how their ideas influenced one another.
The essays in this volume analyze war, its strategic characterisitics and its political and social functions, over the past five centuries. The diversity of its themes and the broad perspectives applied to them make the book a work of general history as much as a history of the theory and practice of war from the Renaissance to the present. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age takes the first part of its title from an earlier collection of essays, published by Princeton University Press in 1943, which became a classic of historical scholarship. Three essays are repinted…
I come from a small country, Hungary, the past of which was consciously falsified in the political system under which I grew up. Some chapters of it, like the cold war period, Soviet rule, the revolution of 1956 couldn't even be discussed. I was lucky because communism collapsed and archives were gradually opened just as I started my career as a historian. Books on international history are usually written from the perspective of the powerful states, I was interested in looking at this story from the perspective of the small guy.Writing this book was both a professional challenge and a personal matter for me. I'm currently a professor at Indiana University-Bloomington.
For readers who are interested in learning how to think about international relations, strategy, security, and history.
The collection of essays discusses US foreign policy, nuclear politics, and the Cold War. My favorite is Trachtenberg’s critical reassessment of the origins of the First World War, a destructive conflict no one wanted to happen but still walked into.
This work is a powerful demonstration of how historical analysis can be brought to bear on the study of strategic issues, and, conversely, how strategic thinking can help drive historical research. Based largely on newly released American archives, History and Strategy focuses on the twenty years following World War II. By bridging the sizable gap between the intellectual world of historians and that of strategists and political scientists, the essays here present a fresh and unified view of how to explore international politics in the nuclear era. The book begins with an overview of strategic thought in America from 1952…
I read my first book on WWII when I was 8 years old. It was about the Battle of Britain and I’ve never looked back. I began specializing in 20th Century Canadian military history in very literally all its facets. Discussing the war with hundreds of Canadian veterans over the last half century has been immensely inspirational to me. I’ve obtained a Ph.D. in Canadian military history from McGill University, visited Canadian battlefields in Europe at least 15 times, worked as the WWII historian at the Canadian War Museum, and have published on many aspects of Canadian military history. For more than 30 years I have been able to teach these subjects to students.
This is a book of unparalleled scholarship by Canada’s finest military historian of all time.
Stacey’s magisterial, wide-ranging, immensely insightful, deeply researched, and engagingly written masterpiece illuminates those many policies and personalities that governed Canada’s tremendous war effort during the Second World War. It is literally one-stop shopping for understanding Canada’s wartime political intricacies (and intrigues!), diplomatic manoeuvring, and industrial and military mobilization.
No stone is left unturned, and Arms, Men, and Governments is, and will remain, unequalled. It has greatly influenced my understanding of this pivotal moment in Canadian military history, and I refer to it constantly in my research and teaching.
