Books, Arts & Manners

Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, by Edward N. Luttwak (Harvard, 283 pp., $20)

Attempting a theoretical treatise on military strategy is pretentious, but no one can deny that Edward N. Luttwak is the most qualified of living military writers. His background guarantees breadth of scope and originality of outlook. He was born in Transylvania, Dracula country, where Hungarians, Rumanians, Germans, and Jews have been savoring the blood of their neighbors for a millennium; was raised in Sicily and educated at a Zionist public school in England; briefly resided in Israel; fell in with a young Californian named Richard Perle at the London School of Economics; was, in his first U.S. job, a flunky for the pro-ABM lobby organized by Paul Nitze and the nuclear theorist Albert Wohlstetter; and has written imaginatively and informatively on nuclear strategy, naval strategy, the Israeli army, the Roman and Soviet empires, and all matters military.

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B. Bruce-Briggs

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Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, by Edward N. Luttwak (Harvard, 283 pp., $20)

Attempting a theoretical treatise on military strategy is pretentious, but no one can deny that Edward N. Luttwak is the most qualified of living military writers. His background guarantees breadth of scope and originality of outlook. He was born in Transylvania, Dracula country, where Hungarians, Rumanians, Germans, and Jews have been savoring the blood of their neighbors for a millennium; was raised in Sicily and educated at a Zionist public school in England; briefly resided in Israel; fell in with a young Californian named Richard Perle at the London School of Economics; was, in his first U.S. job, a flunky for the pro-ABM lobby organized by Paul Nitze and the nuclear theorist Albert Wohlstetter; and has written imaginatively and informatively on nuclear strategy, naval strategy, the Israeli army, the Roman and Soviet empires, and all matters military.