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alesia_charles's review against another edition
3.0
An interesting book, though I don't think it fully engages with what it means that wall-building societies harbor romantic ideas about unwalled warrior societies. It's not an amusing conceit, it's dangerous. How hard would it be to point out that achieving safety via the ability to deal out violence in response to violence is merely a delusion of safety? Yet I kept looking for that to happen in the book and didn't see it.
I'm also extremely dubious about the book's frequently-expressed idea that warrior-society men never did anything but fight. I know that the ancient and early medieval Norse (the "Vikings") were also farmers rather than solely warriors, for example. Relying solely (or so it appears) on highly negative accounts from visitors to those societies is not a good look for a scholar. So it needs to be read a bit skeptically.
I'm also dissatisfied with the last chapter, which discusses recent trends in wall-building quite knowledgeably but, again, does not fully engage with what that means. That is, it obviously means that modern wall-building is about controlling civilian populations rather than being, in general, meaningful barriers in the military sense. (Though with exceptions: obstructing terrorists, for one; but why the author left out the Korean peninsula's DMZ I can't imagine.) The book makes the very useful and fascinating point that the most significant effect of these efforts has been to redirect the flow of civilian populations in motion - that is, what the migrants and refugees do is seek other routes. Yet I saw no real effort to examine what this fundamental shift in the purpose of walls, and the utter failure to address the causes of these mass migrations, means for modern humanity.
Still, as a grand tour through thousands of years' worth of wall-building civilizations and their nomadic enemies, the book is worthwhile. Perhaps its bald recounting of all the times the nomads attacked cities and murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children will make them seem less romantic to its readers. One can hope, anyway.
I'm also extremely dubious about the book's frequently-expressed idea that warrior-society men never did anything but fight. I know that the ancient and early medieval Norse (the "Vikings") were also farmers rather than solely warriors, for example. Relying solely (or so it appears) on highly negative accounts from visitors to those societies is not a good look for a scholar. So it needs to be read a bit skeptically.
I'm also dissatisfied with the last chapter, which discusses recent trends in wall-building quite knowledgeably but, again, does not fully engage with what that means. That is, it obviously means that modern wall-building is about controlling civilian populations rather than being, in general, meaningful barriers in the military sense. (Though with exceptions: obstructing terrorists, for one; but why the author left out the Korean peninsula's DMZ I can't imagine.) The book makes the very useful and fascinating point that the most significant effect of these efforts has been to redirect the flow of civilian populations in motion - that is, what the migrants and refugees do is seek other routes. Yet I saw no real effort to examine what this fundamental shift in the purpose of walls, and the utter failure to address the causes of these mass migrations, means for modern humanity.
Still, as a grand tour through thousands of years' worth of wall-building civilizations and their nomadic enemies, the book is worthwhile. Perhaps its bald recounting of all the times the nomads attacked cities and murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children will make them seem less romantic to its readers. One can hope, anyway.
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