The World's Major Battles and How They Shaped History
By Paul K. Davis

Santa delivered this book to me and I immediately started paging through it. It's an interesting read. The author defines a decisive battle as one that brings about (or prevents) a major political or social change, or one that introduces a major change in warfare. He doesn't limit himself to one battle per war; in fact no fewer than nine are selected from WWII. Although many of the battles are the standards from Western Civilization 101 there are quite a few that are new to me. The author seems to have made a real effort to consider battles that are out of the mainstream.

The earliest battle is Megiddio (1479 BC) and the last one in the book is Desert Storm. Each battle gets about 2,000 - 3,000 words divided into three sections: "Historical Setting", "The Battle", and "Results." A map accompanies most battles, and a few topics get separate treatment in a box of their own, such as "The Sacred Band of Thebes."

Predictably, the entries tend to whet your appetite more than they satisfy. Thus Benedict Arnold's remarkable conduct in the Battle of Saratoga is reduced to the sentence "He [Arnold] and Gates had feuded, and Gates had ordered him to remain out of the fight, but Arnold disobeyed orders and was the heart and soul of the rebel effort." This of course is all that the author intended. A ten-page bibliography will help you find out more about the battles that interest you. The episodic structure of the book makes it ideal for the reader that likes to read a bit at a time.