Paul Kern for Souvenir Press This is a rather weighty tome by a rather pedestrian American academic that nevertheless has lots of meat. Kern starts at the beginning down Sumeria way with the early sieges. Even then the siege was different from battles and involved a lot of nastiness. Things did not get much better with the arrival of scientific sieges under the very nasty Assyrians. Kern sees the Assyrians as the greatest sieges operators (together with their pupils the Persians) until perhaps the Imperial Romans. The Greeks are revealed as not really very good, spending years worth of income to fail to capture one small city. Dionysius of Syracuse appears as a fearsome operator learning from the Carthaginians (benefiting from their levantine origin). In Kern's book the blockade is the weapon of the ignorant. The real operator goes for ramps, engines and other tecchie stuff. Kern certainly knows his ancient history but a little reading in the Middle Ages might help him with the fate of bouches inutiles. A horrid subject but fully covered. Old Duffer's Book Corner Book Reviews The First Armies Verdun 1916 Russia's Civil War Luetzen 1632 Philip V of Spain The End of Chivalry Le Roi De Guerre Warships of the Napoleonic Era Cannae The Death of Anglo-Saxon England Ancient Siege Warfare War and Society in Revolutionary Europe 1770-1870 Forgotten Victory The Remaking of the English Navy Cassino: The Hollow Victory Raising Churchill's Army The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Italy The Irish And British Wars 1637-1654 Cavaliers: The Royalist Army At War 1642-1646 Alamein Normandy 1944 Hill 112 Breaking The Panzers Béveziers (1690) Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914-18 Caesar’s Legion Operation Bluecoat Operation Epsom Marching to the Sound of Gunfire The Franco-Prussian War Robert the Bruce’s Irish Wars When Titans Clashed The Wars of Edward III Monte Cassino Under Fire The Somme Roads to Falaise Mud, Blood And Poppycock All The Kaiser’s Men Iron Hulls Iron Hearts A Noble Crusade The Pendulum of Battle: Operation Goodwood The English Resistance The Battle of Koniggrätz Pallas Armata Back to Perfidious Albion #104 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com