Land of War

A History of European Warfare from Achilles to Putin

De: William Nester

Narrado por: David Colacci

War in Europe began with the first human migrants. Rival bands fought for thousands of years before the Greeks and Romans began writing about their military history, first as legend—for instance, the hero Achilles battling the Trojans—and then as fact. Finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technology exploded: railroads, steamships, telegraphs, machine guns, automobiles, airplanes, and tanks enabled European states to muster, equip, arm, transport, and command more men than ever before, with more firepower than ever before. In the past seventy-five years, atomic weapons changed the military landscape of Europe-as have the internet and cyber warfare.

In this new telling of European warfare—and European history through the continent's all too numerous wars and conflicts—William Nester describes millennia of armed conflict. He covers the "greatest hits" of military history both ancient and current: Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, the wars of the Roman Empire across the continent, the Battle of Hastings, the Crusades, Agincourt, Waterloo, Napoleon and Wellington, the Somme, the Spanish Civil War, Stalingrad and Normandy, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin, Bosnia, and up through Putin's attempts to redraw the map of Europe.

Land of War is an epic odyssey from Europe's mythic origins through its latest violent conflicts.

©2023 William Nester (P)2023 Tantor

I cannot recommend this book.

The book was going along just fine until the last 20 minutes or so. The author is afflicted with TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and lost touch with common sense and critical thinking. His bizarre assertions had no basis led me to question his earlier seemingly incisive and rational conclusions.