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30 Works 483 Membros 4 Críticas

About the Author

Paul K. Davis teaches history at Texas Military Institute. He is the author of 100 Decisive Battles: From Ancient Times to the Present

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Obras por Paul K. Davis

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA

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Paul K. Davis is a senior principal researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research interests include strategic planning and methods for improving it, decisionmaking theory, counterterrorism, advanced methods of analysis and modeling (notably exploratory analysis and multiresolution modeling), and heterogeneous information fusion. He has authored or coauthored widely read books on defense planning, capabilities-based planning, portfolio analysis, and deterrence and influence theory, as well as an integrative review on social science for counterterrorism. Before joining RAND, Davis was a senior executive in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). He has served on numerous national panels for DoD, the National Academy, and the Intelligence Community; he is also a regular reviewer of several professional journals. Davis received his Ph.D. in theoretical chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

https://www.rand.org/about/people/d/da...

Membros

Críticas

This is a set of 3-4 page profiles of one hundred battles listed chronologically. Starting circa 1500 BC with the battle Megiddo and ending at Desert Storm, the book covers a wide range of conflicts and does not leave out any global area. In each profile, the section includes most of the meta information to get introduced (basic statistics) and also to follow up (references). Within the profiles themselves, Davis includes plenty of background and history of the players, including at times adding inset boxes describing associated historical background (e.g. one on the Monroe Doctrine).

The book does have some drawbacks. First, Davis assumes some historical education from the reader related to battles in general. While he is thorough in explaining historical background and personages, he typically does not explain any military battle language, such as the definition of a line, flank, a line getting 'extended', reserves, advances, and more detailed terms not easily guessed by the novice. Descriptions of types of ships or weapons is sometimes missing. Perhaps worst, maps showing landscape and movement are taken from other sources and are often not included. Perhaps just over half the battles have a map, and each one has a different set of symbols, and many maps have no Legend. So the maps themselves, without the legends, have to be guessed at. Finally, there's no sections describing certain techniques that one would find across a number of battles. Replacing some of the historical inset boxes with content about battle techniques that occur frequently would be better drawing the sometimes disjointed book together. Because the book is disjointed and battles have no tie together, the book becomes little more than a collection of Wikipedia 3 page profiles of 100 different battles.

All that said, plucking 100 battle profiles from Wikipedia is a lot of work, and this thick tome is a slow read heavy in history and interesting when taken one battle at a time.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
MasseyLibrary | 2 outras críticas | Oct 25, 2020 |
Libro corposo, circa 600 pagine ed una seria diffidenza iniziale. Il ricordo de “la storia fatta con i se” brucia ancora. Invece un viaggio veloce nelle grandi battaglie della storia, partendo dalle guerre dei faraoni per finire con Bush. Un libro che scorre, per carità, non impressiona, ma lascia rudimenti sparsi qua e là. Debole, molto debole sotto il profilo storico militare, è invece realmente gradevole nello spiegare il perché e gli effetti delle grandi battaglie. I grandi della storia ci sono tutti: Giulio Cesare, Napoleone, Rommel, Giovanna D’Arco, Washington, Saladino. E pure i cinesi. Un libro da leggere e ottimo anche per una semplice consultazione. Senza pretendere troppo.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
grandeghi | 2 outras críticas | Aug 7, 2019 |
 
Assinalado
poreilly | Jul 17, 2010 |
This is a set of 3-4 page profiles of one hundred battles listed chronologically. Starting circa 1500 BC with the battle Megiddo and ending at Desert Storm, the book covers a wide range of conflicts and does not leave out any global area. In each profile, the section includes most of the meta information to get introduced (basic statistics) and also to follow up (references). Within the profiles themselves, Davis includes plenty of background and history of the players, including at times adding inset boxes describing associated historical background (e.g. one on the Monroe Doctrine).

The book does have some drawbacks. First, Davis assumes some historical education from the reader related to battles in general. While he is thorough in explaining historical background and personages, he typically does not explain any military battle language, such as the definition of a line, flank, a line getting 'extended', reserves, advances, and more detailed terms not easily guessed by the novice. Descriptions of types of ships or weapons is sometimes missing. Perhaps worst, maps showing landscape and movement are taken from other sources and are often not included. Perhaps just over half the battles have a map, and each one has a different set of symbols, and many maps have no Legend. So the maps themselves, without the legends, have to be guessed at. Finally, there's no sections describing certain techniques that one would find across a number of battles. Replacing some of the historical inset boxes with content about battle techniques that occur frequently would be better drawing the sometimes disjointed book together. Because the book is disjointed and battles have no tie together, the book becomes little more than a collection of Wikipedia 3 page profiles of 100 different battles.

All that said, plucking 100 battle profiles from Wikipedia is a lot of work, and this thick tome is a slow read heavy in history and interesting when taken one battle at a time.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
shawnd | 2 outras críticas | Feb 1, 2009 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
30
Membros
483
Popularidade
#51,118
Avaliação
½ 3.7
Críticas
4
ISBN
76
Línguas
1

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