Nike’s Apostle

Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, by Victor Davis Hanson (Doubleday, 278 pp., $27.50)

Victor Davis Hanson is the only modern writer I know with the sensibility of an ancient Greek: He, like Homer, is implacable. In his remarkable Carnage and Culture (2001), a mind-opening work, we are with Herodotus-an artist of gentler effects than the Iliad, because of his philosophical distance. With Ripples of Battle, though, we are there: on that concentrated and all but indescribable, except by Homer, plain between Troy and the cobalt sea.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, by Victor Davis Hanson (Doubleday, 278 pp., $27.50)

Victor Davis Hanson is the only modern writer I know with the sensibility of an ancient Greek: He, like Homer, is implacable. In his remarkable Carnage and Culture (2001), a mind-opening work, we are with Herodotus-an artist of gentler effects than the Iliad, because of his philosophical distance. With Ripples of Battle, though, we are there: on that concentrated and all but indescribable, except by Homer, plain between Troy and the cobalt sea.