Bennett’s book on Trafalgar is fairly typical of such books. As a popular history book, it wisely starts with a couple chapters of background, including how naval combat worked in the Age of Sail, and after that he moves on[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posts Tagged history
From the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, Europe went through a fairly profound cultural transformation, beginning with the Renaissance, and ending with the Enlightenment. The philosophies developed during all of this were powerful, and came at the same time as the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alan Schom’s book is supposedly as much on the campaigns leading up to the famous battle as on the battle itself (thus the subtitle). And it generally succeeds at that. Better, it presents a lot of the French side of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Much like the first book, this is a solid but unspectacular Men-At-Arms volume. The Angus McBride art is better this time, with one two-page spread battle scene (shown in part on the cover). There’s a couple where the backgrounds aren’t[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This would be much more appropriately titled The Longobards, but it would unnecessarily further reduce sales on what is already a niche book. Lombardy is a modern region of Italy, and the people living there are Lombards. This is an[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Elting’s history of the Grand Armee of Napoleonic France is justly well regarded. It’s a massive tome that dives into just about every aspect of one of the most successful armies of military history. The main problem is that it[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This second volume of Bryant’s series on the Napoleonic era was published in 1945 (commonly given as 1944, but he mentions “the events of 1939-1945” in his preface), and he has no qualms about drawing a parallel to Britain’s experience[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I picked up this book for cheap some time ago, and I’m quite happy to have finally gotten to it. This is definitely on the “layman’s” side of military history, but he does a very good job with it. The[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Chandler’s massive tome on every campaign Napoleon conducted makes a great one-stop shop for a basic military history of any action you may want to look up. This is aided by lucid accounts all the way through, good maps (which[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
David A. Bell tackles a fairly big concept in a merely moderate-sized book. The main thesis is that warfare underwent a profound change at the end of the Eighteenth Century that still drives how we think of it today. Now,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…