Description:
Sometimes a battle, such as the one that raged along France's Marne River in 1918, involves hundreds of thousands of soldiers and costs many lives. Sometimes, as in the case of Tippecanoe, a battle involves only a few hundred fighters. Great or small, as historian Paul Davis notes, history has turned on clashes such as these. In this well-researched compendium, Davis examines battles that have had far-reaching historical consequences. The first entry covers the Battle of Megiddo, which delivered unto the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III an uneasy dominion over Palestine and broadened his empire into Asia; the final entry, set not far from the first, describes the Allied victory over Iraq in Desert Storm, which "denied control of a large portion of the Middle East oil reserves to dictator Saddam Hussein and showed the ability of a multinational coalition to succeed in the post-Cold War world, perhaps setting an example of future international military action." In between Davis considers similarly fateful but often forgotten contests, such as the Battle of Chalons, when another coalition--this one of Visigoths, Romans, and Gallic and Germanic tribes--turned back the huge Mongol army of Attila in A.D. 451, and the Battle of Shanhaikuan, when, in the spring of 1644, China's Ming dynasty fell to Manchu invaders. Davis sometimes prefers sweeping themes to mundane realities (the fact, for instance, that the Battle of Adrianople turned on the recent invention of the stirrup), and his compendium tends heavily toward Europe at the expense of other parts of the world. The illustrations are also of uneven quality and usefulness. Still, readers with an interest in military history will find this to be a handy reference and overview, and they'll enjoy second-guessing the author, nominating battles that didn't make his hundred while learning from the obscure, but nonetheless critical, ones that he does address. --Gregory McNamee
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