A lively, erudite study of the past in service of the future.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian offers a capacious analysis of how leaders make strategic decisions.
Drawing on a yearlong “Grand Strategy” course he teaches to Yale undergraduates, Gaddis (History/Yale Univ.; George F. Kennan: An American Life, 2011, etc.), the recipient of a National Humanities Medal in 2005, analyzes the processes and complexities involved in devising grand strategies: “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.” The adjective “grand,” he adds, has to do with “what’s at stake,” which is why grand strategies traditionally have been associated “with the planning and fighting of wars.” Arguing that strategic leaders need to be flexible, creative, and observant, the author cites political theorist and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who popularized a memorable line from an ancient Greek poet: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” That big thing—an obsessive idea or abstract ideal—may make a leader appear decisive but is likely to prevent innovation. “Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made,” Gaddis writes. “Resilience accommodates the unexpected.” Elizabeth I, whom he admires, defied traditional expectations by “reigning without marrying, tolerating (within limits) religious differences, and letting a language gloriously grow.” Rather than impose a grand design, she responded deftly to her changing world. Not so Xerxes and Napoleon, who mounted campaigns that failed because of limited “peripheral vision” blinding them to the variables of “landscapes, logistics, climates, the morale of their troops, and the strategies of their enemies.” Abraham Lincoln, too, merits Gaddis’ admiration: Self-taught and astoundingly intuitive, Lincoln “managed polarities: they didn’t manage him.” The author returns often to Tolstoy and Carl von Clausewitz, both of whom respect theory and practice “without enslaving themselves to either.” Abstraction and specificity “reinforce each other, but never in predetermined proportions.” Both writers, Gaddis argues, considered the contradictions and irony of history with “the amplitude, imagination, and honesty” that make them “the grandest of strategists.”
A lively, erudite study of the past in service of the future.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59420-351-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
A well-written, well-argued story of the Civil War in the West. McDonough (History/Auburn Univ.; The Limits of Glory, 1991) continues to explore underexamined aspects of the Civil War, this time the western theater, often thought of as a sidelight to the real scrap in the East. In McDonough's view, the western engagements were crucial in sealing the fate of the Confederacy. He sets the stage for his account of the Kentucky battles by outlining the Confederacy's perilous state in the spring of 1862. The fall in February of the Tennessee river forts Henry and Donelson effectively split the South geographically and led to the abandonment a week later of Nashville, the first Southern capital to capitulate. On April 6, federal and Confederate armies clashed at Shiloh Church with horrific loss of life. Claimed as a victory by the Southern commanding general, the battle failed to halt the federal advance and led to the removal of P.G.T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter and Bull Run, as commander of Confederate forces in the West. He was replaced by the scruffy Braxton Bragg, whose record at Shiloh was itself ambiguous. On April 7, the Union Navy captured Island No. 10 on the Mississippi, which paved the way for the fall 17 days later of New Orleans. The South still had an opportunity to snatch victory at a clash in central Kentucky at a small town called Perryville, where in October 22,000 federals fought 17,000 Confederates. Forced to retreat, Bragg had to give up his dream of retaking Kentucky. The war would drag on for 30 more months, but McDonough shows that Southern defeat was increasingly inevitable. As studies of the Civil War become more narrow in focus, it's refreshing to find a volume that has some sweep to it, using the war in and around Kentucky to encapsulate the entire conflict in the West.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87049-847-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A journey through middle Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, of which George Orwell would have been proud, if he had extended his own travels from the Road to Wigan Pier to Minsk. This is not a land flowing with milk and honey. The region and its peoples have been fought over, uprooted, persecuted, and killed for a thousand years. Just in this century, the Borderlands have survived the collapse of three empires, the division of the spoils after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Second World War, the Holocaust, Stalin's despotism, and the fall of the Soviet Union. As Applebaum, foreign editor for the London Spectator, aptly comments, ``To sift through the layers, one needs to practice a kind of visual and aural archeology.'' She does so with sensitive skill, noting how the cobblestones have disappeared beneath cracked concrete, how medieval foundations have vanished behind ``spectacular monotony,'' and how churches and shops have given way to numbered apartment blocks. She records the rival nationalisms- -Lithuanians hating Poles, Poles hating Lithuanians, everyone hating the Russians. She sees the miles of rusting Soviet naval ships in Kaliningrad, the pit behind the courthouse in Woroniaki in the Ukraine where the KGB dumped the bodies of those they had executed, and records the changes that have taken place as a Ukrainian professor of atheism renames himself professor of religion but delivers the same lectures. She ends her visit in Odessa, with its elegant houses, the only upbeat part of the trip. Otherwise, one is inclined to agree with the Russian who observes sourly that there is no difference between a peasant on the Volga and a man living in the African jungle except that the African has sunlight, fresh air, clean water, and no ice in the winter. The decor may be Soviet drab and mildew, but the book is intelligent, evocative, filled with vivid characterization and an understanding of the history of the area.
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42150-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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