Reviews - The Art of War | The StoryGraph

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This is probably one of the most famous pieces of literature discussing war. I've always wanted to read it, so I finally picked it up. I feel like there needs to be two ratings for this particular book: one for the words of Sun Tzu himself and one for the commentary and footnotes. Because if I was rating just Sun Tzu, I probably would've given it something higher. His thoughts (or the translation of them) are concise and very practical, and some can be applied to situations outside war.

The commentary was where I had the issue. In my copy, every point Sun Tzu made was interrupted by commentary explaining the text or giving other people's thoughts on the subject. I wanted to read and make my own conclusions, not be told how other people interpreted it. So after a while I started skipping over all that commentary.

So if I ever found myself in a bookstore, I would make sure the next copy of this I picked up had all the footnotes and commentary at the end of the book, because it being in the middle of the text was very distracting and made the reading itself less pleasant.

oshmcg's review against another edition

3.75

challenging informative fast-paced

moonofsaturn's review against another edition

4.5

informative

te3gq's review against another edition

3.5

fast-paced

magian_'s review against another edition

3.5

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

thatgirlx03's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

camiesreads's review against another edition

2.0

informative reflective fast-paced

Some of the ideas in this book were a little repetitive & common sense, but I still learned a few things. I thought that this book would be a lot more interesting, but it was a little underwhelming.