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107 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alexander's Art of War, October 20, 2004
In the light of the current world environment, you need to read this book. While Mr. Pressfield played on Sun Tzu's title in his 2002 take-control-of-your-life manual, The War of Art, he goes right to the heart of the matter in Virtues: this book is Alexander the Great's Art of War. Where previous Pressfield novels detailed what the individual combatant was thinking and feeling, Virtues focuses on the leader, the man in charge of it all, logistics, material, tactics, strategy, morale and every other aspect of war.
In six short years since the publication of his classic Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield has set a new standard for historical fiction and sits firmly entrenched at the top of a list of talented writers in that genre. The master's attention to detail through diligent research is without equal. As importantly to his readers, Mr. Pressfield weaves a tale that keeps us hooked on his work from first to last page. His details do not detract or bog down the telling of the tale but serve it. Like it's predecessors, The Virtues of War left me satiated if not emotionally drained when I read its final words:
"The sarissa's song is a sad song
He pipes it soft and low.
I would ply a gentler trade, says he,
But war is all I know.
The wind rose in that moment, lifting the corner of Alexander's cloak. I saw his heel tap Corona's flank. He reined-about and started for the camp, surrounded by his officers."
All of the Pressfield Greek Histories as I've come to call them are narrated. In his previous work, Last of the Amazons, Mr. Pressfield took a big chance and told much of the story through the words of a woman, no small task for a man who did spend time in the U.S. Marine Corps. In Virtues, Pressfield walks the plank again; the risk: for the first time, his tale is told by a real historical figure -- not a fictitious one -- and by none other than the Great One himself, Alexander. Once again, Pressfield has re-invented himself, this time through Alexander the Great.
Not far into the book, I truly felt that I was not reading a novel, rather that I was privileged to sit in the King's own tent, just he and I while I listened to his recollections of things past, most notably his major victories: Chaeronea, Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela, the guerilla war in Afghanistan and Hydaspes. Alexander explained to me the complexities of leadership and I listened closely. The book is written from such a deep, personal level that I recalled the early scene in "Patton" where the General and Omar Bradley stand at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa as Patton recollects the details of the battle waged between the Carthaginians and the Roman Legions. "I was there," Patton comments. I can't help but think Steven Pressfield immersed himself so deeply into his narrator that in a very real sense, 'he was there!'
But this is not a book about the battles that often come to the forefront in the other Pressfield novels. Virtues rarely visits the hand-to-hand combat of Gates of Fire and Tides of War or the detailed massacres in Amazons. No, this book is about leadership. Alexander's first real taste of combat was at Chaeronea in 338 BC under the tutelage of his father, Philip of Macedon. Fifteen years later he when died at 32-years-old, he had conquered the known world. In Alexander's words, Mr. Pressfield explores the decision-making process all leaders confront, and he does not overlook the doubts that are certain to plague a leader and his army as they trek over 11,000 miles on foreign soil for over a decade.
The reader will find himself drawing comparisons between what happened on Alexander's campaign with what is currently happening in that part of the world. How could Alexander conquer Babylon and Baghdad and move on with the certainty that his rear position was in no danger from those he had vanquished? So often we believe that guerilla warfare is an invention of modern man, but Mr. Pressfield shows us how Alexander dealt with the guerilla war in Afghanistan. True, things are much different 2,000 years later, but if history does indeed repeat itself, there are lessons to be learned from the experiences of arguably the most successful General in the history of warfare.
You won't find 'blood and guts' in this story; you will not take the battlefield with GI Joe. You will enter the mind of a man who mastered generalship through all his doubts, trials and tribulations. You may complete this book with a new outlook on current affairs and you may pose many "What if?" questions by super-imposing Alexander the Great onto the world stage as it exists today. You'll enjoy Virtues of War just for the story; you'll appreciate it more for its relevancy.
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50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Genius for Conquest, November 2, 2004
If you are looking for a historical novel of great psychological depth that explores the complexities of one of history's more enigmatic figures, look elsewhere. Alexander the Great was not a personality of more complexity than any one of us. The only subject he excelled at, the only one he showed any interest in, was war. Pressfield has no gripping passages describing an anguished Alexander locked in a moral debate with himself over the justness of his cause or the legitimacy of his methods, because there is no historical evidence that Alexander had any such doubts. "Since I was prepared to pay with my own life," Pressfield's Alexander tells his father early in the novel, "so I was sanctioned to take the life of the foe."
It would be wrong, though, and Pressfield conveys this well, to conclude that Alexander lacked human feelings or emotion. Within his realm of war Alexander comes across as a believable human being, perhaps much like Patton or Guderian had they been absolute rulers of their countries instead of merely talented generals. Alexander, in the speech just quoted, is not justifying butchery, but explaining to a skeptical father how he can fraternize with members of the enemy's elite fighting units, even exchange gifts with them, and then slaughter them quickly and efficiently the next day.
Indeed, creating strong emotional bonds was and is the foundation of a unit's fighting power. So Alexander can trade barracks banter with sergeants one minute and bawl tears with his senior commanders the next. He sleeps on a rude campaign cot and shares all the privations of the march. At one point near the end of their 22,000 mile campaign, he bares his chest and asks if any of his now reluctant compatriots can show more battle scars than he. I know of no book that excels this one in drawing the portrait of leadership.
Alexander realizes that emotional bonds and the valor they inspire are not enough. There are no finer warriors, no better unit on the planet than the Theban Sacred Band, bringing Alexander to tears of admiration as he talks with them before Chaeronea. Yet he kills them all, with the exception of 20 or so who are too wounded even to commit suicide. As Alexander says to his page when recounting the battle years later, Thebes and its Sacred Band, for all their virtues, lost because they did not understand modern warfare.
Alexander does. Valor wins fights, but cold, clear intelligence wins battles. He commands a standing army whose officers and men have not just mastered the art of phalanx warfare, they have invented deceptive ways to turn the phalanx's strengths into exploitable weaknesses. Alexander leads a true combined arms team, perhaps the world's first, using both infantry and cavalry, each employed to play off of the strengths of the other. Except for its weapons, Alexander's is a thoroughly modern force. This is not Pressfield's imagination but historical fact--Alexander was perhaps the first practitioner of "maneuver warfare" in the West (Sun Tzu, by comparison, lived roughly 100 years before him) and one of the inspirations for today's US Marine Corps doctrine.
So join the expedition, and for a few moments you will feel what it would have been like to be dead tired, caught up in the heat, dust, din, and gore of Gaugamela, and suddenly hear the Persian commander call your name, "Iskander!" and think to yourself, "I love the man" as you exert every ounce of strength to strike him down.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worthwhile, September 8, 2005
This novel is a worthwhile entertainment. Pressfield remains one of the more interesting writers dealing with ancient warfare. He has his strengths and weaknesses, but over all he's worth a reader's time. This is not a definitive treatment of Alexander. There are quite a few aspects of his life that Pressfield chooses not to deal with, probably because others have already done so, like Mary Renault and Valerio Massimo Manfredi. This is okay by me in that he gives you a pretty streamlined novel here. Pressfield is a writer that works with an audience in mind. I've heard him say that Tides of War was his favorite novel, but it was also one of his less successful. Readers seemed to tire of the slow pace of it, the back and forth of its political machinations and perhaps an unsatisfying resolution.
So Pressfield hasn't repeated that here. He starts the novel strongly and moves straight ahead with an even pace. I think his weaknesses are in terms of character complexity and development. Alexander is a confusing figure; this novel doesn't do anything to change that, although Pressfield seems to want to. Some of his speeches fell strangely flat to me, more like television bravura than the true words of the world's greatest general. And at times he does say and do things that seem to smack of twentieth century, romanticized ideology. Pressfield is no master of form. He chooses to tell the whole story in first person, creating the rather artificial proposal that we're actually hearing Alexander tell his story to a young man who's writing it all down. This doesn't really hold up to scrutiny - nobody tells a story like this, with exact dialogue, with careful authorial details and complete chronological order - but perhaps the point is that we're not supposed to scrutinize. We're just supposed to read and accept what's there. For the most part I was happy to do this.
Especially so because the author's strength makes up for these flaws - and that is that Pressfield knows how to write about battle. He does so marvelously. It's visual, visceral, gory and graphic. Yet he also lays out the big picture and convincingly details strategy. I read Gates of Fire and liked it well enough, but the battle scenes here show that Pressfield has honestly made himself a student a war and seeks to bring it across in his telling.
I think this is one of the three best novels of distant war I've read in the last year. The others are The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwall, and Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham. Cornwall does an amazing job of narrating from the point of view of a ninth century century english warrior. Never does he feel out of character, and that's a remarkable achievement. Durham's novel is quite different. It's on a big scale, with lots and lots of characters from all throughout the spectrum that was engulfed in Hannibal's war with Rome. I highly recommend these two. Virtues of War isn't quite as good as either, but I recommend it also. They're each different, but all with particular strengths that are worth your time.
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