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steph_84's review against another edition
Did not finish. An ambitious book with an interesting structure and lots of interesting information, but the breadth meant that I neither retained the information nor knew what to learn from each story, so I stopped reading.
bookdragon_sansan's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.0
morgan_blackledge's review against another edition
4.0
Dude. This thing is EPIC. Lawrence Freedman does not play. He begins the book with an account of Chimpanzee warfare and pretty much runs the gauntlet of western (and some eastern but not much) theories, philosophies, methodologies etc. of strategy.
I honestly didn't know what to expect when I began the book. I assumed it would be all about military strategy. And for the first third of the book it pretty much was. Beginning with the Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, then to the Bible (snore), then to Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, and to the foundational military ideas of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. None of which was a surprise.
But then the book shifts gears and focuses on left wing revolutionary strategy including Marx, Gramsci, Lennon and the to Che Guevara and then Tolstoy and on and on. And that actually was a surprise. I did not expect that.
But then he busted out with the right wing and corporate strategy of Peter Drucker and Alfred P. Sloan (of NPR underwriter fame) and Henry Ford. In fact the section on Ford blew my mind. It was great fun. Totally unexpected.
But the he keeps going. Covering thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn (what a frickin genius) and Karl Popper (another frickin genius) all the way to Kahneman,Tversky and later, Talib. All the way to to the modern use of game theory in behavioral economics.
Wow. Any way. He just goes on, and on, and on, and on (in the good way). No one will accuse Freedman of lacking breadth and depth.
After all that, it may sound odd to hear that I wish I could give this one a 3.5
The book is an amazing accomplishment. Freedman set out to cover every important contribution to [western] strategic theory. That is not a trivial task. This book is clearly the life's work of a very bright and dedicated scholar/historian and that alone deserves respect and honorable mention.
He gave fair balance between left, right and center politics. he gave even treatment of military, revolutionary, business and scientific methodologies. He rendered charming little biographies of characters as disperate as Henry Ford and Alan Ginsburg (yes Ginsy is prominently featured in a book about strategy).
So why 4 (3.5) stars?
The book needed to be trimmed. It wasn't tight.
It also lacked a central theme, metaphor, orientation or central anything that could provide a through-line to help the text feel less like a "baggy compendium" or encyclopedia.
I almost said text book, but most textbooks have central, orienting "big ideas" lacing them together.
Another reason I'm bagging on the book a bit is because it's long and therefore it's a significant investment of time and energy to read this thing. I feel like long texts have to be held to a higher standard. they really have to justify their length.
I just read Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree. An equally long, potentially equally disparate text, made very cohesive thanks to a strong central metaphor and an even stronger narrative voice. It's a terrible comparison in some respects, but I feel it's apt in this one particular sense.
This book is excellent. Monumental in some respects. But probably unfinishable if you're not a theory/history dork for the reasons cited.
So four stars it is.
.
I honestly didn't know what to expect when I began the book. I assumed it would be all about military strategy. And for the first third of the book it pretty much was. Beginning with the Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, then to the Bible (snore), then to Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, and to the foundational military ideas of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. None of which was a surprise.
But then the book shifts gears and focuses on left wing revolutionary strategy including Marx, Gramsci, Lennon and the to Che Guevara and then Tolstoy and on and on. And that actually was a surprise. I did not expect that.
But then he busted out with the right wing and corporate strategy of Peter Drucker and Alfred P. Sloan (of NPR underwriter fame) and Henry Ford. In fact the section on Ford blew my mind. It was great fun. Totally unexpected.
But the he keeps going. Covering thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn (what a frickin genius) and Karl Popper (another frickin genius) all the way to Kahneman,Tversky and later, Talib. All the way to to the modern use of game theory in behavioral economics.
Wow. Any way. He just goes on, and on, and on, and on (in the good way). No one will accuse Freedman of lacking breadth and depth.
After all that, it may sound odd to hear that I wish I could give this one a 3.5
The book is an amazing accomplishment. Freedman set out to cover every important contribution to [western] strategic theory. That is not a trivial task. This book is clearly the life's work of a very bright and dedicated scholar/historian and that alone deserves respect and honorable mention.
He gave fair balance between left, right and center politics. he gave even treatment of military, revolutionary, business and scientific methodologies. He rendered charming little biographies of characters as disperate as Henry Ford and Alan Ginsburg (yes Ginsy is prominently featured in a book about strategy).
So why 4 (3.5) stars?
The book needed to be trimmed. It wasn't tight.
It also lacked a central theme, metaphor, orientation or central anything that could provide a through-line to help the text feel less like a "baggy compendium" or encyclopedia.
I almost said text book, but most textbooks have central, orienting "big ideas" lacing them together.
Another reason I'm bagging on the book a bit is because it's long and therefore it's a significant investment of time and energy to read this thing. I feel like long texts have to be held to a higher standard. they really have to justify their length.
I just read Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree. An equally long, potentially equally disparate text, made very cohesive thanks to a strong central metaphor and an even stronger narrative voice. It's a terrible comparison in some respects, but I feel it's apt in this one particular sense.
This book is excellent. Monumental in some respects. But probably unfinishable if you're not a theory/history dork for the reasons cited.
So four stars it is.
.
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