Customer Reviews

Last Stand: Famous Battles Against the Odds

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This is one of these compilation books that have been springing up lately, containing a collection of stories recounting various battles through history. This one purports to study what the author calls "last stands" where the one side or the other was pushed to the wall, and either defeated or so beaten down it was a miracle they survived. While the writing is alright, and the author seems to be reasonably skilled with the facts, there's no analysis or interpretation of what happened, really. Instead it's the thrilling you-are-there stuff that tells you what happened, but does almost nothing to explain why things happened the way they did.

Perrett takes a baker's dozen battles and recounts each of them in about 15 or so pages each. About half of them involve the British army, which the author, being British himself, as much as tells you is the best in the world. Given the length of the individual essays on the battles, there's little space for in depth analysis or discussions of the decisions made in the fighting. Then again, some of the battles (notably Camerone) were so small that such analysis is probably fruitless anyway. The author, then, makes a brief attempt in the "Conclusions" section, after the text, but only says that leadership, training, and morale are important in units if they're to perform like this. I could have told him that...

There's some good material here, and I don't want to be too negative. If you're looking for story-telling about military history, and you don't need or want the analytical part of things, this is probably a good book for you. Unfortunately, I want more from my military history these days than stories.

This book contains thirteen brief chapters on some of the bloodiest battles in military history, and although the emphasis is clearly on Britain, there is also a good sampling of U.S. battles as well. I'm a little disappointed that no mention of Civil War battles was included, as there are plenty of examples of "last stands" (Fort Pillow, Sailor's Creek, Vicksburg, Nashville) that could easily fill a book. Also the editing (at least in the Castle edition I own) was a little sloppy in places. There was little about the Alamo, Custer's Last Stand, or Wake Island in this book that I didn't already know, but the chapters on Napoleon's Old Guard at Waterloo, the "demon" Legionnaires at Camerone, Rorke's Drift, and Arnhem Bridge were very gripping and informative. The maps in each chapter are outstanding and very helpful in giving the reader a visual picture of the battlefields. Much of the book focuses on World War Two battles while only one chapter describes World War One "last stands". So don't expect too much from a book this short. If you're looking for a good introduction to some of Great Britain's and the United States' hardest fought battles, this is a great place to begin.

This book is a series of short essays on famous last ditch battles fought through out history from Waterloo in 1815 through Imjin in Korea in 1952. While it does not cover every great last stand, by no means even a large number of them, it is still a very worthwhile book.

It covers about 10 such battles all over the world during this time period, and is written in a very easy to read format. The stories will keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time, and you will come away from it with a great deal of knowledge. Many of the stories are complete enough to shed light on a single individual involved, not just the whole unit involved.

If you like the underdog, or a fight against all odds, this book is for you.

Conventional thinking to explain why certain groups of armed men are willing to fight to the last man and the last bullet usually revolve around the obvious: esprit de corps, Prussian style training and discipline, absolute loyalty to a charismatic commander, bitter hatred of the enemy, extreme altruism--the list goes on and on. What Bryan Perrett adds in LAST STAND to a mixture that rarely contains all the above is the small number of those willing to die for a cause. Surprisingly enough for the non-military historian is his claim that last stands historically did not involve elite units who presumably would be the most likely candidates for self-sacrifice. The case studies represent a sampling of bravery that ranges from the well-known massacres of Custer at the Little Big Horn to further massacres at the Alamo and to unexpected triumphs at Rorke's Drift. Perrett analyzes thirteen battles all of which involved soldiers willing to fight to the death, and in most of them, they did. Perrett's expertise in wartime tactics and his fluid prose style help to explain why some are willing to die for a belief even if most are not.

In the magnificent style of Brian Perret, this book show us how the man can reach the ultimate sacrifice for what they believed, the prize practically always their own lives, but this book written by a consumated military historian, reminds us of their epic heroism, and how they reach inmortality, so although they die, they will live forever in our memories, thanks to authors like Mr.Perret the ultimate sacrifice for our beliefs will be well remembered. I highly recommend it.