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The work of a fifth-century B.C. heir to the knowledge amassed by a clan of experts of arms and fighting, The Art of War is one of the most useful books ever written on leading with wisdom. Sun Tzu's terse but probing aphorisms come down to us throught the millennia as a practical guide to achieving success by coming to a deeper understanding of the nature of conflict. The Art of War is an essential tool for modern corporate warriors battling to gain the advantage in the boardroom and for anyone looking for advice on how to gain the upper hand in confrontations and competitions.
Here Lionel Giles's famed 1910 translation, laced with commentary from the most illustrious names in Chinese military and historical literature, is brought up to date for today's readers. Excerpts from the work of Western writers and thinkers, ancient and modern--generals, poets, political leaders, and other observers--expand on points made by the master. This new edition offers Sun Tzu's timeless classic both with and without… Read More

From the inside dust jacket:
The true story that we had been spotted seemed almost certain with the arrival of a floatplane and then four bombers. The planes did not bother us as much as the ear-splitting echo-ranging of the destroyer, the pings blasting through our hull as she closed the range.
"Set all torpedoes on two feet and open the outer doors!" . . . from the Fourth Patrol, Part V.
The hunter has become the hunted, and thus begins the classic dance of death between destroyer and submarine, which may end with a crashing salvo of depth charges or the zing of a 21-inch torpedo. Packed with the danger, tension, and drama of submarine warfare, this scene has been replayed countless times in fact and fiction, but never before with such authentic firsthand detail.
Samuel Eliot Morison called Tang "fabulous." Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the submarine force in the Pacific during World War II, described her fifth patrol as "one of the great submarine cruises of all time." Richard… Read More

From inside dust jacket:
THE FIRST WORLD WAR created the modern world. A conflict of unprecendented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation.
Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and… Read More

From inside dust jacket:
For many Americans the First World War is the forgotten war: a war that seems to have fallen into an historical void between the Civil War and World War II. This is surprising given its profound significance to the United States. More than four million Americans were mobilized in 1917-18, of whom more than 100,000 were killed--double the number who died in Vietnam. This was the first, bloody step on the road to globalism which would characterize our foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. Even American literature was transformed by the impact of the war on writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Internationally, more than any other event, the First World War made the twentieth century what it was: It topped the four great empires of the Old World and left a fifth--the British--mortgaged to the hilt. More than nine million men lost their lives, yet none of its stated objectives were met. Rather, it spawned seven decades of Communist rule in Russia, the rise of… Read More

From inside dust jacket:
This is the story of one of the strangest, hardest fought, least known, and most important wars in American history. It is also the story of the spirit of an age: Manifest Destiny and expansion of a young, robust, and restless nation. The tale begins with the Alamo, or, rather, with the United States remembering the Alamo by annexing the Lone Star republic of Texas and then invading Mexico. When it ends, more than half of Mexico--including the present-day states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado--will belong to the United States.
436 pages including index.

From back cover:
The orthodoxy regarding the relationship between politicians and military leaders in wartime democracies contends that politicians should declare a military operation's objectives and then step aside and leave the business of war to the military. In this timely and controversial examination of civilian--military relations, Eliot A. Cohen chips away at this time-honored belief with case studies of statesmen who dared to push, provoke, and even defy their military officers to great effect.
Using the experiences of Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion to build his case, Cohen offers compelling proof that, as Clemenceau put it, "War is too important to be left to the generals." By examining the shared leadership traits of four politicians who triumphed in extraordinarily varied military campaigns, Cohen contends thast active statesmen make the best wartime leaders, pushing their military subordinates to succeed where they might have failed if left… Read More

From inside dust jacket:
John Warry's eminently readable, detailed exploration of the art of warfare in the Graeco-Roman world traces the evolution of weapons, fortifications, and battle tactics from the Mycenean and Homeric ages (more than 1000 years B.C.) to the barbarian invasions of Rome in the fifth century A.D. In his analysis of armed conflict, the author presents the reasons behind the fighting - the social and political roots of each struggle and the long-range ambitions of the leaders--and draws a portrait of military culture and military life throughout the classical period.
Julius Caesar, Demetrius the Besieger, Hannabal, and Alexander the Great are only a few of the colorful, cunning, and brilliant military commanders to be encountered here in accounts of the Trojan, Persian, and Peloponnesian wars, the decline of Sparta, the rise of the Macedonian Empire, the Punic Wars, the civial wars in Rome in the first century B.C., the wars of the Triumvirate, the Imperial Roman conquests, and the… Read More