“Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times”, by Thomas R. Martin

288 pages, Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0300067675

In Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times Thomas Martin manages to present a cohesive and fundamental narrative. His synopsis is brief but to the point and provides an excellent building block for further inquiry, while his prose maintains the reader’s interest in a superior way without overly technical terminology. Encompassing the Paleolithic through the Classic era, Martin artfully presents the politics, the economy, the confrontations, and the everyday life of Greece and its inhabitants, it is, overall, a worthwhile overview of the cultural history of Greece.

However, in my opinion it is a bit weak in some areas. There is a lot on Greek plays and philosophers and a lot on Greek government and religion, but book contains almost nothing on the military history of Greece. While the wars between the Greeks and Persians and those between Athens and Sparta are discussed, the discussions are brief; furthermore, the history per se is focused mostly on Athens with a bit on Sparta, and while other city-states are mentioned, they are discussed almost entirely in the context of their interactions with these two. Unfortunately, even the histories of Athens and Sparta are not discussed in very much depth: for instance, while the defeat of the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra is mentioned, there is no mention of the fact that Epaminondas led the victorious Theban army into the Peloponnese, freeing the Messenian helots from over 200 years of virtual enslavement by the Spartans.

The good thing about the book is that the author quotes many primary sources, unlike many others who quote secondary sources, while the use of maps and time lines help to put events into perspective. Overall it is a useful source for a student, but it is not a leisurely read; rather, one must reflect on and often stop to think about and to decipher the language used by the author. The book could use a good editing to clean up the language and sentence clarity if the author wishes for a broader audience than undergraduates.

“Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea”, by Robert K. Massie

880 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 9780679456711

Anyone who read and liked Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War should appreciate his new Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. As in the earlier book, although the ships and navies of the two rival nations are always at center stage, it is the people who built those ships and directed their activities and operated them and – in this book – fought them that really make the text vivid.

And what personalities! Winston Churchill; the extraordinary Jacky Fisher, the true father of the Dreadnought-type battleships that defined the era; the glamorous Admiral David Beatty, who captivated the British public; Kaiser Wilhelm; Admiral Franz von Hipper, and so on and so forth. If anything, the narrative in Castles of Steel is even more compelling than that of the first book because it deals with the drama and chaos of the Great War itself. Massie’s narrative lucidly explains the course of the naval war from the very opening days until the German High Seas Fleet scuttled itself after the conclusion of hostilities to prevent its delivery to its enemies. Along the way, several complex, controversial episodes are examined, including the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign and the Battle of Jutland, the great clash of battle fleets towards which decades of naval technical development had been aimed.

Massie does not shy away from exploring the bitter in-fighting that erupted after the guns of battle had fallen silent, and he appears to present the arguments on both sides of controversies fairly. Although his portrait of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty is as an ambitious politician whose directives sometimes seeded chaos rather than order, Massie by no means holds Churchill solely or perhaps even chiefly responsible for the Gallipoli debacle. The admirals and generals on the spot are shown to have repeatedly erred and provided London with faulty advice. With Jutland, Massie’s basic sympathy is clearly with the quiet, somewhat cautious Jellicoe rather than with his flamboyant subordinate, David Beatty, who according to Massie later did much to rob Jellicoe of deserved credit while evading blame for his own errors.

Castles of Steel will thoroughly dispel the notion that the two great fleets were largely passive throughout the war (excluding Jutland) and that the naval war was a bit of a sideshow to the real action on land. He shows how decisive even an indecisive result at sea could be (as long as Britain could maintain its blockade on Germany while avoiding strangulation of its commerce by the U-boat campaign). Massie is also strong on showing how Jutland – whatever its tactical outcome – must have been a strategic defeat for the High Seas Fleet, since it left the U-boats as Germany’s only offensive option at sea. That in turn led to America’s entry and Germany’s certain defeat on land. Massie is not as interested in the details of the U-boat war; although his chapter on the subject is able and informative, he does not attack it with the same passion and detail as he does the surface ships. In that he resembles his hero in this book, Admiral Jellicoe, a master of surface warfare who respects and fears these new weapons, but does not really make them his own.

A masterful story-teller, Massie’s prose easily takes the reader in and makes it hard to set this book down. I recommend this monumental achievement, even if you are not at all interested in military history. This is history as high adventure.

“The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution”, by Barbara W. Tuchman

365 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0394553337

Barbara Tuchman subtitles her book The First Salute as A View of the American Revolution, which seems applicable enough. It is the view from the European side, at least at first, for although it seems to revolve around the issue of the American Revolutionary War, the book spends a great deal of time on Eurocentric issues of the centuries building up to the main event; so much so that the Revolution almost seems subsumed by an entirely different, and not unpleasant, topic of Dutch independence from Catholic Spain (if Dutch civil government doesn't seem directly pertinent to the original idea, at least it is made to seem interesting).

Fortunately, the author is actually moving forward with such seeming digressions in her own arcane fashion. The book builds much along the lines of the Revolutionary War itself: a bit of glory to start with, then a slowdown with key triumphs to keep the reader involved, growing increasingly political, and then emerging from all the murk to a glorious, desperate triumph. The final chapter, giving us the battle of Yorktown, seems to leap from the page, and all of the seemingly disparate stokes of earlier chapters show just how each event came into place at precisely the right moment in precisely the right way for great men to launch a nation from. Somehow, Yorktown seems miraculous and inevitable at the same time. If a history book can be said to have a surprising and shattering ending, this book does it. I learned more about British, French, Dutch, and even Russian involvement in the birth of the USA than I even knew existed. Although I brought some basic knowledge to the table, this book painted the arch of the war in a way I never completely understood, and I will never view the early history of my country in the same way. An erudite, entertaining, and educational novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed this work because it presented a needed view of the American Revolution and how the international context supported our victory. It provides lessons in how the preeminent power of an age can be humbled by a coalition of forces, determination, and coincidence. It shows just how fragile the fabric of our revolution's success actually was. This was, however, not up to Ms. Tuchman's usual standard of excellence, but that is still good enough, because the history is good in all but one respect: she depreciates A.T. Mahan while using and espousing his arguments and presentations. By coincidence I had just read Mahan's Influence of sea power on History before reading The First Salute. It was apparent that in her research Ms. Tuchman also had read Mahan. She incorporated his arguments and yet criticized them out of context. A small flaw in, but significant to students of history, especially to those with more than a passing interest in sea power. I would not have noticed this discrepancy had I not just read the other work first. Ms. Tuchman's work is a valuable addition to the body of work on the American Revolution and sea power. It is a must read for both sets of lessons: those of history and objectivity in an author.