Victor Davis Hanson Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The End of Sparta (2011)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Western Way of War (1989)
  2. Hoplites (1991)
  3. The Other Greeks (1995)
  4. Fields Without Dreams (1996)
  5. Who Killed Homer (With: ) (1998)
  6. Warfare & Agriculture in Classical Greece (1998)
  7. The Soul of Battle (1999)
  8. The Land Was Everything (2000)
  9. Carnage and Culture (2001)
  10. Bonfire of the Humanities (With: ) (2001)
  11. The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (2002)
  12. Craft of Northern California (2003)
  13. Mexifornia (2003)
  14. Ripples of Battle (2003)
  15. Between War and Peace (2004)
  16. A War Like No Other (2005)
  17. An Autumn of War (2007)
  18. War, Ancient and Modern (2008)
  19. How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security (2009)
  20. Makers of Ancient Strategy (2010)
  21. The Father of Us All (2010)
  22. Obama: The Dream and the Reality (2012)
  23. The Savior Generals (2013)
  24. The Second World Wars (2017)
  25. The Case for Trump (2019)
  26. The Dying Citizen (2021)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Victor Davis Hanson Books Overview

The End of Sparta

In this sweeping and deeply imagined historical novel, acclaimed classicist Victor Davis Hanson re creates the battles of one of the greatest generals of ancient Greece, Epaminondas. At the Battle of Leuktra, his Thebans crushed the fearsome army of Sparta that had enslaved its neighbors for two centuries. We follow these epic historical events through the eyes of M lon, a farmer who has left his fields to serve with Epaminondas swept up, against his better judgment, in the fever to spread democracy even as he yearns to return to his pastoral hillside. With a scholar’s depth of knowledge and a novelist’s vivid imagination, Hanson re creates the ancient world down to its intimate details from the weight of a spear in a soldier’s hand to the peculiar camaraderie of a slave and master who go into battle side by side. The End of Sparta is a stirring drama and a rich, absorbing reading experience. Praise for Victor Davis Hanson: ‘I have never read another book that explains so well the truth that ‘war lies in the dark hearts of us all’ but that history offers hope.’ William Shawcross on The Father of Us All’Few writers cover both current events and history and none with the brilliance and erudition of Victor Davis Hanson.’ Max Boot on The Father of Us All’Enthralling.’ Christopher Hitchens on The Western Way of War

The Western Way of War

Second EditionThe Greeks of the classical age invented not only the central idea of Western politics that the power of state should be guided by a majority of its citizens but also the central act of Western warfare, the decisive infantry battle. Instead of ambush, skirmish, maneuver, or combat between individual heroes, the Greeks of the fifth century b.c. devised a ferocious, brief, and destructive head on clash between armed men of all ages. In this bold, original study, Victor Davis Hanson shows how this brutal enterprise was dedicated to the same outcome as consensual government an unequivocal, instant resolution to dispute. The Western Way of War draws from an extraordinary range of sources Greek poetry, drama, and vase painting, as well as historical records to describe what actually took place on the battlefield. It is the first study to explore the actual mechanics of classical Greek battle from the vantage point of the infantryman the brutal spear thrusting, the difficulty of fighting in heavy bronze armor which made it hard to see, hear and move, and the fear. Hanson also discusses the physical condition and age of the men, weaponry, wounds, and morale. This compelling account of what happened on the killing fields of the ancient Greeks ultimately shows that their style of armament and battle was contrived to minimize time and life lost by making the battle experience as decisive and appalling as possible. Linking this new style of fighting to the rise of constitutional government, Hanson raises new issues and questions old assumptions about the history of war.

Hoplites

Incorporating research from ancient literary, iconographic, epigraphic and archaeological sources, this one of a kind book explores the experiences of the Hoplites, soldiers who conducted battle on the small plains of Ancient Greece. The nine contributors to Hoplites both British and American scholars discuss the pragmatic concerns of Greek infantrymen, covering everything from the mechanics of phalanx advance to the proper procedures for the dedication of spoils. Contributors also address the techniques of fighting, the use of commands, music in warfare, the use of dog tags,” as well as the role of ritual sacrifice on the battlefield.

The Other Greeks

For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the Greek city state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the vast majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the real ‘Greek revolution’ was not merely the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm. The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of ancient Greece are ‘The Other Greeks,’ who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough minded, practical, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson’s reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by hands on knowledge of the subject he is a fifth generation California vine and fruit grower is fresh, comprehensive, and absorbing. His detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today the imminent extinction of the family farm.

Fields Without Dreams

Eulogizing the vanishing lifestyle of the family farm, Victor Hanson calls for America to take notice of its lost simplicity and purity before it is too late. ‘Victor Davis Hanson…
is a writer as much as a farmer. His memoir is complex passionate, angry, honest, scorching’. Jane Smiley, ‘The New Yorker’.

Who Killed Homer (With: )

With straightforward advice and informative readings of the great Greek texts, the authors show how we might still save classics and the Greeks for future generations. Who Killed Homer? is must reading for anyone who agrees that knowledge of classics acquaints us with the beauty and perils of our own culture.

Warfare & Agriculture in Classical Greece

The ancient Greeks were for the most part a rural, not an urban, society. And for much of the Classical period, war was more common than peace. Almost all accounts of ancient history assume that farming and fighting were critical events in the lives of the citizenry. Yet never before have we had a comprehensive modern study of the relationship between agriculture and warfare in the Greek world. In this completely revised edition of Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, Victor Davis Hanson provides a systematic review of Greek agriculture and warfare and describes the relationship between these two important aspects of life in ancient communities. With careful attention to agronomic as well as military details, this well written, thoroughly researched study reveals the remarkable resilience of those farmland communities.
In the past, scholars have assumed that the agricultural infrastructure of ancient society was often ruined by attack, as, for example, Athens was relegated to poverty in the aftermath of the Persian and later Peloponnesian invasions. Hanson’s study shows, however, that in reality attacks on agriculture rarely resulted in famines or permanent agrarian depression. Trees and vines are hard to destroy, and grainfields are only briefly vulnerable to torching. In addition, ancient armies were rather inefficient systematic ravagers and instead used other tactics, such as occupying their enemies’ farms to incite infantry battle. Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece suggests that for all ancient societies, rural depression and desolation came about from more subtle phenomena taxes, changes in political and social structure, and new cultural values rather than from destructive warfare.

The Soul of Battle

Victor David Hanson, author of the highly regarded classic The Western Way of War, presents an audacious and controversial theory of what contributes to the success of military campaigns. Examining in riveting detail the campaigns of three brilliant generals who led largely untrained forces to victory over tyrannical enemies, Hanson shows how the moral confidence with which these generals imbued their troops may have been as significant as any military strategy they utilized. Theban general Epaminondas marched an army of farmers two hundred miles to defeat their Spartan overlords and forever change the complexion of Ancient Greece. William Tecumseh Sherman led his motley army across the South, ravaging the landscape and demoralizing the citizens in the defense of right. And George S. Patton commanded the recently formed Third Army against the German forces in the West, nearly completing the task before his superiors called a halt. Intelligent and dramatic, The Soul of Battle is narrative history at it’s best and a work of great moral conviction.

The Land Was Everything

What does the imminent death of the family farm mean to the average American? A great deal, declares Hanson, who as both a farmer and a classics professor California State University Fresno imbues this provocative, eloquent polemic with personal experience plus an unshakeable agrarian vision that harks back to Greece, Rome and the early American republic. Agribusiness, says Hanson, has obliterated the rural culture that once was the matrix of American society. The superabundance bestowed by corporate mega farms, he adds, comes at a price: factory farms, propped up by mostly hidden government support and dependent on toxic pesticides and fertilizers, pollute the air, water and soil as they turn out bland, tasteless produce for a voracious, rootless and soulless consumerist society. Hanson Fields Without Dreams is totally unsentimental about small scale independent farming; far from being tranquil, bucolic and simple, he reports, it is a brutal, dirty, maddening, messy, always difficult, sometimes deadly pursuit. Yet family farming, he insists, cultivates bedrock values reliance on self and family, distrust of complexity and bureaucracy, skepticism of taxation, willingness to stand up to evil whether the enemy be insects, weeds or monopolistic landowners values that are integral to a resilient, egalitarian democracy but that he believes are now in short supply. Hanson models these impassioned essays on Crevecoeur’s 1782 classic Letters from an American Farmer and sprinkles his barbed critique of contemporary American culture with allusions to Virgil, Pericles, Pindar, Euripides and Thucydides. Even if readers don’t plan to go back to nature, his feisty, curmudgeonly,challenging, ruminative essays provide much food for thought.

Carnage and Culture

Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes’s conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world. Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.

Bonfire of the Humanities (With: )

With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleagured, discipline classics and reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselves their careerist ambitions, incessant self promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other things as the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to academic populism, an approach characterized by accessible, unspecialized writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.

The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

Western warfare as we understand it today has its foundations in the warfare of the ancient Greeks. This brilliant account, full of unique insights into the warfare of Ancient Greece, covers a millennium of war: from the development of the Greek city state, to the Persian Wars; from the Peloponnesian War of the late fifth century BC, to the military revolution of the fourth century BC and the end of the citizen militia under Philip, to the rise of Alexander the Great and the Hellenisation of the western world

Mexifornia

This book is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter century.

Ripples of Battle

The effects of war refuse to remain local: they persist through the centuries, sometimes in unlikely ways far removed from the military arena. In Ripples of Battle, the acclaimed historian Victor Davis Hanson weaves wide ranging military and cultural history with his unparalleled gift for battle narrative as he illuminates the centrality of war in the human experience. The Athenian defeat at Delium in 424 BC brought tactical innovations to infantry fighting; it also assured the influence of the philosophy of Socrates, who fought well in the battle. Nearly twenty three hundred years later, the carnage at Shiloh and the death of the brilliant Southern strategist Albert Sidney Johnson inspired a sense of fateful tragedy that would endure and stymie Southern culture for decades. The Northern victory would also bolster the reputation of William Tecumseh Sherman, and inspire Lew Wallace to pen the classic Ben Hur. And, perhaps most resonant for our time, the agony of Okinawa spurred the Japanese toward state sanctioned suicide missions, a tactic so uncompromising and subversive, it haunts our view of non Western combatants to this day.

Between War and Peace

In his acclaimed collection An Autumn of War, the scholar and military historian Victor Davis Hanson expressed powerful and provocative views of September 11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan. Now, in these challenging new essays, he examines the world’s ongoing war on terrorism, from America to Iraq, from Europe to Israel, and beyond. In direct language, Hanson portrays an America making progress against Islamic fundamentalism but hampered by the self hatred of elite academics at home and the cynical self interest of allies abroad. He sees a new and urgent struggle of evil against good, one that can fail only if we convince ourselves that our enemies fight because of something we, rather than they, did. Whether it s a clear cut defense of Israel as a secular democracy, a denunciation of how the U.N. undermines the U.S., a plea to drastically alter our alliance with Saudi Arabia, or a perception that postwar Iraq is reaching a dangerous tipping point, Hanson s arguments have the shock of candor and the fire of conviction.

A War Like No Other

One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other. Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present. Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also as*sesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato. Hanson’s perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises many thought provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it more like America s own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the fabric of a glorious society, or even this century s red state blue state schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present. Brilliantly researched, dynamically written, A War Like No Other is like no other history of this important war. From the Hardcover edition.

An Autumn of War

On September 11, 2001, hours after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the eminent military historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article in which he asserted that the United States, like it or not, was now at war and had the moral right to respond with force. An Autumn of War, which opens with that first essay, will stimulate readers across the political spectrum to think more deeply about the attacks, the war, and their lessons for all of us.

How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security

In this revealing broadside, Victor Davis Hanson explains how President Obama has imprinted his domestic ideology of victimhood onto a therapeutic, Carter inspired foreign policy. In Obama’s vision, the United State renounces its role as a defender of the postwar order and instead becomes an agent of global change one that questions our existing system of defense, values, alliances, interests, and commerce. In tactical terms, Obama believes that his ‘hope and change’ rhetoric and non traditional background give him a moral authority abroad that will trump any inconsistency in U.S. foreign policy. But, as Hanson explains, at some future date, regional hegemons like Iran, Russia and China will demand even more acquiescence on the theory that the present government of the United States either will not object, or will do nothing concrete to stop them.

Makers of Ancient Strategy

In this prequel to the now classic Makers of Modern Strategy, Victor Davis Hanson, a leading scholar of ancient military history, gathers prominent thinkers to explore key facets of warfare, strategy, and foreign policy in the Greco Roman world. From the Persian Wars to the final defense of the Roman Empire, Makers of Ancient Strategy demonstrates that the military thinking and policies of the ancient Greeks and Romans remain surprisingly relevant for understanding conflict in the modern world. The book reveals that much of the organized violence witnessed today such as counterterrorism, urban fighting, insurgencies, preemptive war, and ethnic cleansing has ample precedent in the classical era. The book examines the preemption and unilateralism used to instill democracy during Epaminondas’s great invasion of the Peloponnesus in 369 BC, as well as the counterinsurgency and terrorism that characterized Rome’s battles with insurgents such as Spartacus, Mithridates, and the Cilician pirates. The collection looks at the urban warfare that became increasingly common as more battles were fought within city walls, and follows the careful tactical strategies of statesmen as diverse as Pericles, Demosthenes, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Caesar, and Augustus. Makers of Ancient Strategy shows how Greco Roman history sheds light on wars of every age. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David L. Berkey, Adrian Goldsworthy, Peter J. Heather, Tom Holland, Donald Kagan, John W. I. Lee, Susan Mattern, Barry Strauss, and Ian Worthington.

The Father of Us All

Victor Davis Hanson has long been acclaimed as one of our leading scholars of ancient history. In recent years he has also become a trenchant voice on current affairs, bringing a historian’s deep knowledge of past conflicts to bear on the crises of the present, from 9/11 to Iran. ‘War,’ he writes, ‘is an entirely human enterprise.’ Ideologies change, technologies develop, new strategies are invented?but human nature is constant across time and space. The dynamics of warfare in the present age still remain comprehensible to us through careful study of the past. Though many have called the War on Terror unprecedented, its contours would have been quite familiar to Themistocles of Athens or William Tecumseh Sherman. And as we face the menace of a bin Laden or a Kim Jong Il, we can prepare ourselves with knowledge of how such challenges have been met before. The Father of Us All brings together much of Hanson’s finest writing on war and society, both ancient and modern. The author has gathered a range of essays, and combined and revised them into a richly textured new work that explores such topics as how technology shapes warfare, what constitutes the ‘American way of war,’ and why even those who abhor war need to study military history. ‘War is the father and king of us all,’ Heracli*tus wrote in ancient Greece. And as Victor Davis Hanson shows, it is no less so today.

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