Warless Societies and the Origin of War

Rating:
Summary: Dry but interesing content
Review: I agree with the previous review in its critic: the book is arid. I could not finish it: I started with the first forty pages and I jumped till the end. Books are to be read: if they are deadly boring, nobody will read them, threfore they will be used for nothing.

However, I had the feeling that the author, in order to defend his ideas, has taken great pains to define precisely the term "war" and to construe a statistical base of warfare in primitive societies. So I am no expert to judge whether his thesis are right or wrong, but at least, he did it in a scientific way. Stadistics are similar to a laser knife in modern surgery: it alone does not save lifes, but without it, no way.

Rating:
Summary: Unreadable prose
Review: This book is impossibly jargon-filled. The author writes as if addressing a tenure committee. Consider this sentence from the introduction: "Defining war and delineating the boundaries between war and other partially similar phenomena raise important issues with regard to both classifying hunter-gatherer societies in terms of the presence and frequency of warfare and ascertaining the point in a sequence of conflictual events at which war has begun." After reading this sentence how many readers will proceed any further? I would recommend Richard Keeley's War Before Civilization as a concise, forceful argument full of vivid examples written in plain English for the general reader.