Customer Reviews

Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The author, John Keegan is a noted British historian that has spent most of his time on European warfare. It was interesting to see what he was going to come up with in this study of the battles primarily in the U.S. The book opens with something probably all American's will enjoy, a chapter talking about how much he loves American and the particular reasons why, maybe this was just a buttering up technique so that we would buy the book? He then covers four major battles / wars that have taken place in North America, the French Indian War, the American Revolutionary war, the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars.

Obviously whole books or series of books can and have been dedicated to these particular topics so the reader should be prepared for just a light overview of each of the wars. Keegan takes the reader into one particular point or battle within each war after giving the reader a very good brief on why the war is taking place, the parties involved and then the outcome. He does a very good job here with this overview.

Overall the book is easy to read and interesting. The beginning chapter will make you happy just reading it and the good feelings will remain with you through out the book. This book is much lighter and less detailed then many of his other works so it does serve as a good introduction to the author.

This was the first of Keegan's books I read, and I came to it with high expectations due to his reputation. At first I found his story-telling style very engaging and I enjoyed some of his insights (e.g. concerning the Battle of Quebec in 1759). But then the amazing succession of factual and typographical errors became truly shocking. The latter are not of great significance, they are simply irritating; the former are inexcusable from an author who lectures at the most prestigious military academies in this country and abroad. Two examples of the most egregious mistakes support this assertion. At one point Keegan has Thomas Jefferson visiting Bent's Fort, in Colorado, which Keegan notes was built in 1833. As the most amateur historian knows, Jefferson died on the 50th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. Even if Keegan is unaware of that, wouldn't he think it unlikely that a 90 year old man would be traveling to Colorado in 1833? Then, in discussing the Civil War battle of Shiloh, Keegan has Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston ordering a retreat the day after he was killed. This is a major goof since, as any Civil War buff knows, it was Johnston's fatal wounding on the first day which gave Grant the chance to save victory from the jaws of defeat. In view of these, and many, many other errors of fact, one has to wonder how this book ever saw the light of day.

Few Americans could have written such a work. It is our great fortune as Americans to have Mr. Keegan to tell the story with such style and readability. It is a fascinating story of the wars that shaped the North American continent and the United States in particular. It also opens our eyes to how historical trends we might not have noticed oterhwise - such as the importance of fortifications in US expansion across the continent. Despite our belief and espousal of maneuver or mobile warfare, fortification has been a halmark of US military doctrine. Mr. Keegan brings out this paradox and helps us see our history in a different light. Mr. Keegan does not disappoint in this volume from the great expectations we might have from his other books.

"Fields of Battle" by John Keegan is a disappointment if you expect the book to fulfill its basic thesis. The book is designed to explore and describe four major military battles that took place on the North American continent, instead what you get is a great deal of remembrance and travelogue interpersed with discussions of the battles. Additionally, the final chapter on the Wright Brothers invention of the airplane seems totally out of place.

When the author stays on topic the material is quite interesting with the chapter on Custer's Last Stand the best written. Not having read any of Keegan's other works I am reluctant to read any others despite his fine reputation as a historian and military affairs journalist.

John Keegan has a pretty good reputation as an historian, but in this venture he has put together a hurried and clearly commercial product that does not do him justice. His understanding of the American Indian and how they made war is pitiful. He quotes Lewis & Clark as authority for the fact that the Blackfoot are part of the Sioux tribe, a mistake unlikely to be made by an American expert. He further considers the Sioux to have been the most warlike of the plains tribes, and in that he is just wrong. The Comanche hold that honor for their continued battles with the Spanish and then the Texans over a period of more than a hundred years.

Many readers of Keegan will be put off by this personal narrative style. The publishers wronged Keegan by retitling the American publication. The importance of this book lay in Keegan's observations of the Amercian military culture. Readers looking for strict history should read Keegan's other books.

This book wins in two dubious categories. It has more factual errors than any book I can recall and more typos than seem possible. This book could not possibly have ever met an editor. Did the Times reviewer actually read it? Could Keegan have really written it? No. He must have been compelled to sign the manuscript under duress. How else could the name of the world's foremost military historian become associated with this mess? The battle of Barrington? Come now

I have read all of Keegan's major works. I really don't understand what he's trying to say in this one, however. He just "loves America," and talks about how close Civil War battlefields are to the I-95. Keegan's getting sentimental. And a bit, well, goofy

I was very disappointed by this book. I've enjoyed some of Keegan's other works, such as "A History of Warfare." But this book is less history and more memoir of his love affair with the United Sates. The history that is included has many factual errors, such as thomas Jefferson living to 1833.

Apparently this book was marketed appropriately in the UK, but the US publishers apparently wanted to cash in and gave it a misleading title and jacket. If you want to know about John Keegan, read this book. If you want to know about the wars of North America, look elsewhere.

With a novelist's eye and a cultural anthropologist's sensitivity, ''Fields of Battle'' includes one fascinating description after another of how Americans do things differently from the English or French -- in designing military cemeteries, locating military academies, organizing university life. It also bears witness to what were, in retrospect, revolutionary changes in American life over the past 40 years.

The substance of the book, however, lies in its account of wars that are often forgotten by modern Americans, with their shallow sense of history (we do not live in time) -- those fought on our soil in the 18th and 19th centuries. North America, Mr. Keegan says, is ''a continent of conquest,'' the evidence for which lies in the strings of old forts sprinkled throughout the nation. ''Fields of Battle'' includes vivid descriptions of conquerors who needed to know the land to conquer it, and so were often map makers like Samuel de Champlain or surveyors like George Washington. Its focus, however, is on fields, not faces -- on geography that explains how specific battles were fought and why in war after war fighting recurred in much the same places: near Chesapeake Bay, for example, or along the water route linking the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers via Lake Champlain.

Mr. Keegan retells some often-told tales with great skill. He describes the exploration and conquest of French Canada, as well as the entire French and Indian War, in one chapter. In another he covers the Revolutionary War, and summarizes its causes more accurately in a few lines than some writers have done in entire books. ''Fortifying the Confederacy,'' on the Civil War, concentrates on Gen. George McClellan's ''Peninsular Campaign'' of 1862, in part because that campaign revisited sites from the Revolutionary War.

The best of these military accounts, however, is the last -- on the wars with the Plains Indians, and particularly George Custer's ''last stand'' in 1876. Mr. Keegan holds readers at the edge of their seats watching Custer ride across the crest of hills lining the valley of the Little Bighorn, then order his men to form a front facing the Indians swarming toward them from all sides.