Since I read a WWII novel in the buildup to GWII (If you can boil Gravity’s Rainbow down to a WWII novel), I thought I’d better go back to the Mother of All War Stories, another book you pretend to have finished in college, Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War.
Considered the first clear attempt at fact- not myth-based history, HOTPW puts paid to the idea that there’s anything new in the art or business of war. I’m only about a quarter of the way in, still in the escalation to war between Sparta and Athens, the alliance and superpower, respectively, of their day, and page after page have played out in the news.
Some things change forever, but some things are painfully the same, no matter what you hear.
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the making of, by greg allen