Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think

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Personal ripples

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2020

My history teacher in Germany asked me a long time ago: "Ursula, what happened in 1917?" My answer was: "My grandfather was 19 and wounded in the first World war. He was sent home, survived, married my grandmother and had 3 children, one is my father. His injuries made him unfit for battle in the following war, in which he stayed home and protected our little village... I could go on and on and of course this was not the answer my teacher was looking for. The pathos after WW2 in Germany was palpable and my generation's empathy for our silenced elders avoided the ever present elephant in the room. The first pages of this book touched me in ways I can't describe. I love all of Professor Hanson's writings, I don't just read it, I bath in it.

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Carlo

Initial chapter on Okinawa is the best of the book

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2014

Initial chapter on Okinawa is the best of the book. The more you read the less convincing the author's points become. I'm a fan of Hanson but he failed to hold my attention from start to finish.

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Carlo

Initial chapter on Okinawa is the best of the book

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2014

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Initial chapter on Okinawa is the best of the book. The more you read the less convincing the author's points become. I'm a fan of Hanson but he failed to hold my attention from start to finish.

3 people found this helpful

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nelda

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

Always enjoy Victor Davis Hansen. Great writer.

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Thomas M. Magee

A new look at a few old battles

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2020

This book takes three battles, Okinawa, Shiloh, and the ancient battle of delium and looks at them from different angles. He looks at the impact of the battle on a few key leaders, policy or tactics. It isn't a recap of this unit went here or there then this happened. Most of the material focuses on how it impacted various leaders or policies.

An example is in the battle of Okinawa. You see how the fighting there moved US policy to accept the atomic bomb a few weeks later. They did not want to repeat the carnage. The author also goes to prove how suicide bombers can hurt but don't defeat. He proves that easily in that chapter. The book on Shiloh has a similar streak. The author shows the impact of the battle, positive and negative on various leaders like Sherman or Forest. I did not see the impact to the "Western Way of War" like the book cover promises. However, you will learn from this for sure.

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The Sanity Inspector

Riding The Waves Of War

Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2004

Edward Shepherd Creasy's classic Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World would seem to be the prototype of this book. But Dr. Hanson's theme is more subtle than merely listing the big hinges of fate. The battles he picks caused less dramatic but still far-ranging influence on our policies and even our attitudes. It's a very interesting read, as are all of VDH's writings.
I don't quite go along with some of the suppositions. Sherman's march to the sea was far from the first punitive campaign in history, though he persuades me that Shiloh caused Sherman to take up that style of war. The battle of Delium's influence must have been very subtle indeed, as the connecting thread is vanishingly faint, to my mind. Invoking a what-if influence, of Socrates possibly having been killed in that battle, is cheating; for by that standard any battle that any future famous person survived would have to count as an influential battle.
The Shiloh section is best for the account of how careers were launched and scuttled, how reputations were born, and how myths were created. His description of how the savagery of the fighting on Okinawa greased the skids for the deployment of the atom bombs is well done. The Imperial Japanese expected a bloodbath, expected Okinawa to fall, but did not expect that their show of suicidal fanaticism would prompt the Americans to one-up their brutality. And that's what stopped the war and, according to Hanson, provides precedent for Americans to escalate the modern War on Terror way beyond what the jihadists bargained for.
Hanson's storytelling powers and erudition are wonderfully entertaining, whether you agree with his points or not. The book's a bargain simply for the history lessons.

27 people found this helpful

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Jeffery Steele

The Impact of War

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2003

Hanson argues that modern academic trends have downplayed the impact that battles have on history. With many historians now emphasizing cultural and social history and with fewer Americans having a direct experience with battle, public awareness has faded of how far-reaching has been the consequences of war. By focusing on three important battles that have been somewhat neglected, "Ripples of Battle" attempts to show that warfare is not isolated in history, but has a rippling effect that pushes out in all directions from the battlefield.
Hanson uses a counterfactual approach to prove his point. What would have become of Western philosophy if Socrates had not survived at Delium? If General Albert Sidney Johnson survived at Shiloh, would the notion of the glorious lost cause have taken root in the South? Did the death of the commanding general in charge of the battle of Okinawa prevent an inquiry into the great loss of life on that island? These questions are but a few examples of what Hanson teases out of his history of three battles.
I greatly enjoy Hanson's writing. He vividly describes battles and what's important about them. He has a natural sympathy for the characters of fighting men. But in "Ripples of Battle", he fails to adequately demonstrate his point. Of course, battles have ripples. But all history has ripples. And while the life and death consequences of warfare might mean the ripples of battles spread further out than those found in more mundane history, Hanson's examples do not always refer to the life and death consequences of battles. This makes it difficult to sympathize with Hanson's point.
An example is the case of General Lew Wallace, who saw his young career ruined by events at Shiloh. Hanson argues that because Wallace never got over the turn his career took after the battle and felt unfairly treated, he began a new career as a novelist. He became enormously successful after writing "Ben Hur". His protagonist in the novel, like Wallace himself, was a victim of unfortunate circumstances. Hanson sees this whole train of events (and more) as stemming from a battle. But this seems like a tendentious reading of history. One could take almost any event and see ripples of this kind spreading out if one were so inclined.
As descriptions of three battles, "Ripples of Battles" works; as a demonstration of the powerful impact of battle, it falls short. Hanson is right that for those families who lose loved ones, the ripples of battles are among the most powerful eddies in history. But, for other cases, he doesn't show them to be any more powerful than other events in history

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Dirk Nomad

excellent raw material that's force-fitted into overly dolled-up clothing

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2007

I found this book maddening. Okinawa and Shiloh are definitely battles that Americans should be more aware of and knowledgeable about. And it was interesting learning about the Battle of Delium. And any hypothesis or theory that gives an author the excuse to write about these kinds of battles is welcome.

But I'm the kind of guy who likes his coffee black, his tequila neat, and his history the same way. Just tell me about the battles and forget about the dubiously-argued "ripples." I felt he was trying to beat us over the head with repetitively telling us why it was important that so and so didn't die in the particular battle and how the battle supposedly determined their future. He tries to draw connections that didn't convince me. I don't believe that there is any directly correlative link between Japanese kamikazes and al-Queda suicide bombers. My guess is that the typical radical Islamic suicide bomber of today never heard of the kamikaze and in any event is doing it for different reasons. The least worthwhile portion of the book occurs in the section on Delium where he goes on for pages and pages to argue the obvious: that if Socrates had died in the Battle of Delium the history of Western Philosophy would have been different. There - I just said it in one short sentence. Why does it take the author a dozen pages to make the same simplistic point? The last section that ties in 9-11 to the discussion is regrettable - first of all, it sounds very "2003-ish" and thus already seems dated when read in 2007. He also abandons a historian's objectivity and instead sounds like an official spokesman for the Bush Administration. He is also wrong when he says that once 9-11 occured, Europeans were pleased to see us brought low, were critical of US foreign policy and sought a third, perhaps "German" way. He's got it confused. As we all will recall, the day after 9-11, NATO invoked the self-defense provisions of the alliance for the first time EVER, for the first time in history the US flag was raised on Buckingham Palace and the National Anthem played, and our Afghan campaign was supported. It was only later, about a year later, when the Bush administration sought to will into existence a cassus belli against Iraq, that our European friends began to balk. It probably reminded them of Austria-Hungary's unmeetable demands against Serbia in July of 1914.

The book to me had the tone of a serialized set of long feature articles in Harpers or Atlantic Monthly, or maybe the New Yorker - more than the tone of a history book.

This was another one of those books that was given to me as a birthday or Christmas gift about four years ago and I finally got around to reading it. I probably would not have bought it myself based on the book-jacket description.

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