WAR LIKE NO OTHER, A(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis
Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking
accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the
twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with
our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work
to date, A War Like No Other.
　　Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of
Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the
collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote
the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given
readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative.
But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological
account that reflects the political background of the time, the
strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in
multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events
echo in the present.
　　Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on
land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment
of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from
sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also
assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and
Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including
Sophocles and Plato.
　　Hanson’s perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises
many thought-provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like
America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the
Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of
Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it
more like America’s own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the
fabric of a glorious society, or even this century’s “red
state—blue state” schism between liberals and conservatives, a
cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson
daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising
ways in which the past informs the present.
　　Brilliantly researched, dynamically written, A War Like No Other
is like no other history of this important war.
　　From the Hardcover edition

　　Victor Davis Hanson has written or edited numerous books,
including The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks,
The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. He
is also the author of two bestselling collections of essays: An
Autumn of War and Between War and Peace. He is director emeritus of
the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and
currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. He has been a National Endowment
for the Humanities fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced
Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, an Onassis fellow in
Greece, Shifrin Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and
a recipient of the Eric Brendel Memorial Award for journalism. He
lives and works with his wife and three children on their
forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was
born in 1953.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　“The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence and
atrocity: a ‘Thirty Year Slaughter.’ In order to understand the
lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the
Greeks felt it, and reflect it as they did. In this dual task,
Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications
are unrivalled.”
　　–Christopher Hitchens, author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys
and Essays
　　“This book will immediately become the standard companion volume
in English to Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars. Its own battle
narratives are unexcelled; but its singular merit is its
comprehensive and detailed de*ion of how the actual fighting
was done, how generals led, and why each side–Sparta and
Athens–went to war. The author is a man of action and a practicing
farmer as well as the premier classical historian and military
commentator of our day.”
　　–Josiah Bunting III, author of Ulysses S. Grant
　　“The Peloponnesian War was grand and tragic but the sheer misery
of those who experienced it has often been overlooked–until now.
From death by trampling to cannibalism, from preteen-sized knights
on ponies to deformed and ghostly plague survivors, from elegant
galleys to bloodbaths in waterlogged death traps, the dark cones of
classical combat are all brought to light by Hanson. This is a
groundbreaking book by a great historian.”
　　–Barry Strauss, author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval
Encounter That Saved Greece–and Western Civilization
　　From the Hardcover edition.