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A review by dbaker
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War by Victor Davis Hanson
3.0
I almost quit so many times in the first chapter. He seemed fixated on forcing uninteresting modern parallels and made a lot of problematic statements, such as harping on this being a "civil war" and insisting that Pericles didn't have a plan.
I'm glad I finished, because it was full of a lot of helpful information (big-picture trends and cultural background, etc). But throughout, it suffered from sloppy writing. E.g. three sentences building to a point, but then the use of the exactly opposite conjunction than was called for. I like grapes. They are healthy and affordable. They are easy to pack. Despite this, I eat them every day. Huh? This type of error happened a lot, and a few sentences were just absurdly misplaced.
He is - I think - pretty clearly writing for a popular audience that doesn't necessarily have Thucydides memorized. Yet though I get this wasn't a chronological story of the war, he does make odd assumptions that he can just reference a battle and expect the reader to have remembered, from other sources, all the details as he makes points that depend on that knowledge. Yet other battles are described in great detail. So all in all, an odd, mixed bag.
I'm glad I finished, because it was full of a lot of helpful information (big-picture trends and cultural background, etc). But throughout, it suffered from sloppy writing. E.g. three sentences building to a point, but then the use of the exactly opposite conjunction than was called for. I like grapes. They are healthy and affordable. They are easy to pack. Despite this, I eat them every day. Huh? This type of error happened a lot, and a few sentences were just absurdly misplaced.
He is - I think - pretty clearly writing for a popular audience that doesn't necessarily have Thucydides memorized. Yet though I get this wasn't a chronological story of the war, he does make odd assumptions that he can just reference a battle and expect the reader to have remembered, from other sources, all the details as he makes points that depend on that knowledge. Yet other battles are described in great detail. So all in all, an odd, mixed bag.