A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War by Victor Davis Hanson
Published by Random House Trade Paperbacks in September of 2006. A War Like No Other is classical historian Victor Davis Hanson's offering on the Peloponnesian War - the 27 year struggle between the Delian League (Athens and its allies) and the Peloponnesian League (Sparta and its allies) that ran on and off again from 431 to 404 B.C. Hanson's book is perhaps also a "book like no other" if I may borrow a phrase. Despite the prominently placed quote for the New York Times on the front cover proclaiming that it is a contemporary retelling of the war, this is not a narrative history of the war. Rather, it does exactly what the subtitle promises - it tells the reader HOW the war was fought. It analyzes the techniques, the weapons, the strategies and the tactics but it is not a history per se. The book vaguely follows the course of the war, but often shifts backwards and forwards through the decades of the war and even before and after the war. Vic