Last Stands

Why Men Fight When All Is Lost

By: Michael Walsh

Narrated by: Michael Walsh

What are we willing to die for? Michael Walsh restores the dignity of lost concepts like honor, duty, sacrifice, and patriotism for our unheroic age.

What is heroism? What are its moral components - altruism, love, self-sacrifice? Why was it once celebrated, and now often dismissed as anachronistic? In this dramatic account of last stands in history - famous or otherwise - Walsh explores the stakes that led men at very different times and places to face overwhelming odds and certain death for the sake of family, home and country.

In Last Stands, Walsh writes about battles in which a small group faced overwhelming odds, and all too often died to the last man - battles like Thermopylae, the Ronceveaux Pass, the Alamo, the siege of Malta, Little Big Horn, Stalingrad, Rorke’s Drift, and the Warsaw Ghetto - explaining why they were fought, what their ultimate outcome was, and their afterlife in history, myth, and culture.

©2020 Michael Walsh (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Russia “not a colonizer?”

I believe the millions of citizens of various former Soviet republics might quibble with such a statement


He states since the Russo-Japanese conflict, the Russians had no interest in eastern expansion. Mukden, Manchuria, IndoChina are but a few of the commonly known examples of eastern adventurism that the author misses—-not to mention Afghanistan and Pakistan closer to home.


Good grief!



Kinda of makes you wonder what other basic facts he gets wrong.



Those particular shockers, inaccuracies in WW2 strategy, and a certain homogeneity in the examples he uses raises questions about the entire work



Listen to the introduction and the early classical examples and move on.



The rest is redundant, factually suspect and as such, not worth you time.

Amazing Narration of the most Epic Battles of All Time

The author is the most informed I have ever read concerning certain historical battles which were the tipping point of World and American history. His academic yet easy going narration style is both educational and entertaining, a balance which is very hard to accomplish in audiobooks; this author nails both content and delivery in reading his own work. In a word, outstanding! … and it is not a spoiler to relay that through his poignant depiction of his own father in the Epilogue, he truly saves the best for last.

Required Reading

A slice of what makes history worth knowing....death, hero’s, the USMC, fathers and sons, amen.

Excellent

Why men fight, and the cultural devastation when they won’t. No special snowflakes need apply.

Interesting but title implies more

Interesting but some examples of last stands not the best that could have been chosen.

Alot on USMC. Author is son of decorated marine so understood. That said, a mere nod to the fact that 21 Army divisions fought in the Pacific vs 6 Marine would have been appropriate. Army did more amphibious landings and suffered more casualties. Marines only had a higher percentage killed.