Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present, 2nd Revised Edition

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This is a very robust book covering military history up to the end of the Viet Nam war. It is broken down into chronological snipets that are grouped by locale. At just over 1,300 pages, it paints a good picture of the battlefield primarily at the strategic level. The authors did include a good deal of tactics as well as new technology also. This is a great book for research of military history.

This book is worth its weight in gold. It's best selling point, I believe, is that it offers a tight chronological narrative of warfare from Ancient to Modern Times (into 20th century) that really can't be found elsewhere. What's more, virtually every battle or siege, even obscure ones that don't show up in military history surveys, are covered. The book shares one drawback with historical sources in general in that the numbers given for the size of armies and casualties aren't totally reliable. But that is the case for the study of military history--for some clashes--even up to and including World War II.

The authors concede in the preface that it is difficult to divide military history by centuries. But they use that time span to provide a detailed discussion of the advances in weaponry and strategy and tactics during that period. An excellent detail of the book is that those passages include excellent explanatory line drawings. Alas, I just wish they had provided some line drawings of battles. But what would you expect from a book that requires more than 1,500 pages to convey its materials? The authors don't waste a single page of the book in a frivolous way. It's a serious work of military history and a crucial invesment for the historian or military enthusiast.