Rating: 
Summary: Comment on judgement
Review: One of your reviewers wrote: "I have painly read half of this book, and I have decided to give up and look for another book on the same subject." I am reading the entirety of the Mr. Keegan's book. John Keegan may well have, and certainly does have this encyclopedic learning of warfare and its history and is indeed one of the century's most distinguished military historians, as the dust cover suggests. His judgement however is suspect at least in part. I was particularly interested in his take on Hitler's Germany (pgs. 371-4). Mr. Keegan writes of the Allied strategic attack on German cities (brutal though they were), "a few brave individuals rightly denounced it as a moral regression," as though Adolf Hitler did not initiate these murderous Nazi terror bombings in Poland, Rotterdam and in Keegan's own U.K., etc. And did not William Shirer -- "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" -- write that the German people until the very end, "still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler saw (him as )the country's savior?" One can only wonder if Mr. Keegan would "rightly denounce" America's and Britain's response to the inhumanity and brutality of Sept. 11, 2001 as a moral regression. The difficulty may be, but for a couple of possible exceptions, John Keegan has no interest nor regard for providence or for any divine element in the affairs of men and so consequently this makes for some dry reading. Otherwise Mr. Keegan is a brilliant and learned historian and for those interested in a secular view of the history of human warfare, this is an excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: Broad and powerful...
Review: This book is a fantastic piece of military history: it is well written and researched, thoughtful, but not overdone.
Firstly, it gives a panoramic view of various military societies, ranging from the Micronesian to the Romans to the Mongols to the modern day armies of Europe. It gives the reader a basic education in many different armies/military societies from around the world.
Also, A History of Warfare has an interesting purpose: to essentially disprove the theories of the 19th-century military philosopher Clausewitz, whose philosophy Keegan believes led to the First World War.
It stands as a fine work of general military history and is highly reccommended.
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