War and Our World: Reith Lectures, 1998

War and Our World: Reith Lectures, 1998

by JohnKeegan (Author)

Synopsis

War has afflicted the life of mankind in this century as it has done in no other. The First World War killed ten million people, the Second fifty million, and wars since 1945 have killed millions more. Nuclear weapons, a product of the Second World War, have the potentiality not only to destroy lives on a scale greater than any yet explained or even imagined but to obliterate organised society itself. Because the story of war is intertwined with that of mankind from the earliest recorded times, no short book can encompass its whole history. John Keegan therefore concentrates in significant themes: the impact of war on our century and the forms it has taken; the origin of war in human nature and history; the adoption and use of war by states as an instrument of policy; the experience of war by individuals and human groups and its effect on their existence; and, finally, the future of war, particularly the question whether there can now be an end to it.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
Publisher: Pimlico
Published: 01 Apr 1999

ISBN 10: 0712665668
ISBN 13: 9780712665667
Book Overview: In 1998 the BBC Reith Lectures were given by John Keegan, the most distinguished military historian alive today. Their subject was war-its origins, its history and its future-and in this book based on the lectures John Keegan has distilled all his thoughts on warfare and its social implications.

Media Reviews
Majestic...War, he argues, has been the curse of our civilization and our century. Never has war been so destructive as in the late industrial era, and he backs his claim with a superb sweep of history since the beginning of organised warfare, armies and fortification, to the present age of the nuclear bomb, smart weapons, the urban gueriila and the terrorist. * Times Literary Supplement *
The most readable and the most original of living military historians. * New York Times Book Review *
Author Bio
John Keegan is the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998, he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle, Six Armies in Normandy, Battle at Sea, The Second World War, A History of Warfare (awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), Warpaths, The Battle for History, The First World War, and most recently, Intelligence in War. For many years John Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and he has been a Fellow of Princeton University and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received the OBE in the Gulf War honours list, and was knighted in the Millennium honours list in 1999. John Keegan died in August 2012.