Book Review: Why Nations Go To War
While I was getting ready to review the book I finished today, I realized I completely forgot about this one. So, here is a review of a book I finished for class about two months ago.
Title: Why Nations Go To War
Author: John G Stoessinger
Number of Pages: 448
Physical Book or E-book: Physical
Genre: Nonfiction
Series: None
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Review: As I said above, this book was for class, my Conflict and Terrorism class, to be precise. I'm sure no one is surprised. Anyway, while come class books you just muddle your way through or pretend you've read them when you really haven't, I actually enjoyed this one. It gave a good history of ten major conflicts of the past century as well as an evaluation of why the author thinks that war started. Unfortunately, the book is still packed somewhere, so I'm going to have to fudge on some things.
There were ten chapters and ten wars covered: WWI, WWII (Russia v Germany), Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the first Gulf War, the 2005 Lebanon War (I think) as well as all the Bush wars in the Middle East. Yeah, this is where I start to fudge. He also had a prologue and epilogue where he described his experiences with escaping Hitler during the second World War. I think he was coming from Poland, but it may have been Germany or Austria. I think I may be confusing his biography with my Post-Soviet prof who I know escaped from Poland.
Each chapter covered the basic history with an emphasis on what the individuals were doing and how their motives effected things. This is where I felt the book lost some points. From the beginning, Stoessinger's thesis was that everything came down to the leaders. It was always their fault. While I feel that was true in a number of cases (the former Yugoslavia, especially), I also felt it wasn't always. For example, World War I escalated as it did because of the already existing plans for mobilization and escalation. Things were clear cut and very hard to turn back around. While the Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas did begin the escalations (and Austria, but for the country that started it, very little is ever said about them), I don't think they realized just what was going to happen. Their generals took over and made sure that things continued to progress. I think it was an impossible political situation stretched to breaking.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. The facts are good. Stoessinger does delve into the personal lives of the leaders and try to explain what they were going through. That's something you tend not to see in regular history books that present the facts as "this is what happened and when things started and who cares why." This also gave me a better understanding of a couple of wars that I knew the basics of but wasn't really sure about some of the causalities. Again, Yugoslavia is the best example. I knew things broke down after the Soviet Union collapsed and that it was based on ethnic tensions and the fact that people were mixed up like woah in the area, but I didn't realize some of the historic problems that had been dampened by Tito's leadership and then exploded by Milosevic.
This is a good book if you're curious about one of the wars and want to know more about it but don't want to read a whole book. Or, if you want to know more about major conflicts in the last century with no preference as to which ones. You can skip around chapters as one or the other interest you and you can skip the prologue and epilogue all together. If I hadn't had a quiz over both, I would have.
The only bad thing about this is it is considered a textbook, so it's not cheap. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to study political science. Anyone else, if you can get it from a library or a used book store, that's your best option.
Yearly Totals:
Number of Books Read: 4
Number of Pages Read: 1118
Title: Why Nations Go To War
Author: John G Stoessinger
Number of Pages: 448
Physical Book or E-book: Physical
Genre: Nonfiction
Series: None
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Review: As I said above, this book was for class, my Conflict and Terrorism class, to be precise. I'm sure no one is surprised. Anyway, while come class books you just muddle your way through or pretend you've read them when you really haven't, I actually enjoyed this one. It gave a good history of ten major conflicts of the past century as well as an evaluation of why the author thinks that war started. Unfortunately, the book is still packed somewhere, so I'm going to have to fudge on some things.
There were ten chapters and ten wars covered: WWI, WWII (Russia v Germany), Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the first Gulf War, the 2005 Lebanon War (I think) as well as all the Bush wars in the Middle East. Yeah, this is where I start to fudge. He also had a prologue and epilogue where he described his experiences with escaping Hitler during the second World War. I think he was coming from Poland, but it may have been Germany or Austria. I think I may be confusing his biography with my Post-Soviet prof who I know escaped from Poland.
Each chapter covered the basic history with an emphasis on what the individuals were doing and how their motives effected things. This is where I felt the book lost some points. From the beginning, Stoessinger's thesis was that everything came down to the leaders. It was always their fault. While I feel that was true in a number of cases (the former Yugoslavia, especially), I also felt it wasn't always. For example, World War I escalated as it did because of the already existing plans for mobilization and escalation. Things were clear cut and very hard to turn back around. While the Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas did begin the escalations (and Austria, but for the country that started it, very little is ever said about them), I don't think they realized just what was going to happen. Their generals took over and made sure that things continued to progress. I think it was an impossible political situation stretched to breaking.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. The facts are good. Stoessinger does delve into the personal lives of the leaders and try to explain what they were going through. That's something you tend not to see in regular history books that present the facts as "this is what happened and when things started and who cares why." This also gave me a better understanding of a couple of wars that I knew the basics of but wasn't really sure about some of the causalities. Again, Yugoslavia is the best example. I knew things broke down after the Soviet Union collapsed and that it was based on ethnic tensions and the fact that people were mixed up like woah in the area, but I didn't realize some of the historic problems that had been dampened by Tito's leadership and then exploded by Milosevic.
This is a good book if you're curious about one of the wars and want to know more about it but don't want to read a whole book. Or, if you want to know more about major conflicts in the last century with no preference as to which ones. You can skip around chapters as one or the other interest you and you can skip the prologue and epilogue all together. If I hadn't had a quiz over both, I would have.
The only bad thing about this is it is considered a textbook, so it's not cheap. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to study political science. Anyone else, if you can get it from a library or a used book store, that's your best option.
Yearly Totals:
Number of Books Read: 4
Number of Pages Read: 1118