Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson
Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson
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Carnage and Culture
Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power

Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Narrator: Bob Souer

Unabridged: 20 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/10/2019


Synopsis

Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times—from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes's conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive—Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world.

Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values—the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship—which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of more than two dozen books, ranging in topics from ancient Greece to modern America, including The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. He lives in Selma, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Robert on February 05, 2017

Brave indeed is the academic prepared to take on the cultural relativists in today's academy, but Hanson, like the Westerner he is, suits up here for a massive ground assault straight up the gut. He will surely piss off the fashionably PC crowd who have been reared to despise just about anything Wes......more

Goodreads review by Jay on June 12, 2018

At Delphi, the ancient Greeks used two words to inscribe a profound thought: Know Thyself. Socrates made the same point with blunter words: The unexamined life is not worth living. In current parlance, the questions are: Who are we? What are we? If you’re serious about answering these questions, you ne......more

Goodreads review by Gavin on February 07, 2017

Written as a rebuttal of Mr Jared Diamond's book Guns, germs and Steel. Mr. Hanson is trained as a Classicist, though he only started academic work after his Californian raisin farm failed. It is well written. Diamond's (I have not read it) thesis is that cultures become superior through accidental......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on February 05, 2017

This was a very thought-provoking book. At first, I was expecting more of a historical survey "12 Greatest Battles of World History" and there was an homage to those sorts of volumes dating back to Gibbon and beyond. Instead, this book is a rebuttal to Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel and the lar......more

Goodreads review by J.W. on February 08, 2017

I periodically re-read this book, and just finished the fourth reading a few days ago. Hanson, in my opinion, is America's best historical author when it comes to explaining how Democracy and lethal war-making go hand-in-hand. He explains the development of western civilization in a way that makes s......more