Thursday, January 1, 2009

Battle, and Queen Victoria's Little Wars

Battle: a Visual Journey Through 5000 Years of Combat and Queen Victoria's Little Wars.
Battle is fairly graphics heavy, with three or four portraits and illustrations per page. Opening the book at random to page 160-161, it uses those two pages to cover Ramillies, Malplaquet, Dettingen, Fontenoy and Culloden--each one with date, location marked on a map of Europe, plus estimates of forces and casualties for each side, plus a couple hundred words on the course of the battle and its consequences--as well as a brief description of the Duke of Marlborough. That's fairly typical, although occasionally you get a page or two with something like an overview of the Hundred Years War, or Nelson's navy.
Little Wars picks several campaigns and tells their story, with attention to the interesting people who participated. It doesn't tell how many men and guns were on each side, nor give maps of the battlefields; instead of tells about people like the British lady who rode along with a cavalry charge in the Crimea to see what it was like, and a battle in the Indian Mutiny in which the two British commanders both outranked each other.

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