PRAISE FOR A WAR LIKE NO OTHER

“Definitive. Engrossing. A masterpiece. It is difficult to marshal all the requisite superlatives for Victor Davis Hanson’s new book on the Peloponnesian War. Hanson takes up the story where Donald Kagan, whose four-volume history of that world-altering conflict … left off. Kagan provided a sweeping political and strategic overview of the war; Hanson … shifts the focus and brings the reader into the guts of battle.… Hanson’s command of his subject is as impressive as his erudition is lightly worn.… Hanson, like Thucydides, teaches us about the tragic nature of war.”

—National Review

“The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence, and atrocity: a ‘Thirty-Year Slaughter.’ In order to understand the lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the Greeks felt it, and reflect on it as they did. In this dual task, Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications are unrivaled.”

—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS,
author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“This book will immediately become the standard companion volume in English to Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. Its own battle narratives are unexcelled; but its singular merit is its comprehensive and detailed description of how the actual fighting was done, how generals led, and why each side—Sparta and Athens—went to war. The author is a man of action and a practicing farmer as well as the premier classical historian and military commentator of our day.”

—JOSIAH BUNTING III,
author of Ulysses S. Grant