Super interesting read, learned a lot but the structure made some content a little repetitive. Highly recommend reading while playing or after having played the Assassins Creed Oddysey to put some faces to names. Did not realize Alcibiades was such a scum bag from the game but good to hear how his story ends in this book haha

VDH simply fails at being anything less than brilliant. A stunning walkthrough of the Peloponnesian War, not ordered by chronology but type of fighting. By structuring it this way, the different notes of the conflict really come out, and you see why Thucydides wasn't happy to refer to it merely as just another πόλεμος.

Having read through Thucydides once, I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of new names, places and events that needed to be taken in. I've found VDH's book to be a really helpful stepping stone to rereading 'The Peloponnesian War' - it definitely assumes you've read Thucydides, but also takes time to unpack so many elements that are glossed over, and now I feel much clearer on the events and so more ready to reread the original.

A War Like No Other retold the Peloponnesian war by thoroughly explaining each aspect of how the Athenians and Spartans fought and strategized. This was not a strictly chronological account, but he gives general time frames about what is being discussed. My favorite chapters detailed how the Spartan strategy of raiding was largely unimpactful, the effects of the plague, and the explanation of naval warfare. I always assumed that Triremes and navys had a greater range than they did.

A consequence of this style of retelling is that events that occur are largely background noise to the strategies and topics Hanson discusses. He will describe the event or battle in little detail unless it better serves to illustrate the effectiveness of a tactic. This was a problem for me when I didn't have general knowledge of the event that occurred, as my only background knowledge comes from Anthony Everitt's book The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World's Greatest Civilization . This is a great book if one is interested in learning more about the Peloponnesian war, specifically the tactics and techniques the ancient Greeks used in war.

It's a classic in military history literature. I recently read a survey history of ancient greece and wanted to learn more about the Peloponnesian War. Each chapter contained a theme that the author analyzed in detail: Why the war was fought; Spartan's unsuccessful scorched earth policy in Attica; the impact of disease; hoplite warfare; horses and cavalry in warfare, especially for the Syracusans; naval warfare, and the author's conclusions. Hanson amazingly shows how the Peloponnesian War was more than a civil war, but a war of brutality, ethnic cleansing, and the rise of opportunists like Alcibiades. He also uses analogies to other wars, including the current wars in the middle east, to explain the impact on events. If you want to learn about Greek Warfare, then this is your book.

Informative.

Absolutely fascinating book. It has a strong limitation - it is not told thematically, and actually understanding the war between Athens and Sparta as a series of events in time is a bit of a challenge. But this is more than made up by the clarity of the prose, and the attention to the broader themes - naval war, cavalry as a force on the battlefield, the impact of slaves on the conflict, the battles between hoplites, sieges of cities. If you know only that Athens was a democracy, and Sparta an oligarchy, you will learn much from this book.

Meh.

The author treats the reader as if the reader is mentally handicapped. Can’t go three pages without comparing a battle, a political policy, city-state, army or strategical decision with modern-day America, the nazis, Hitler, the nazis, the waffen-SS, the nazis. He repeats himself on and on again about the same facts, same information without adding anything new of value. The concluding chapter then just repeats what you have just read in an intellectually insulting way.

Just read Thucydides instead.

This book is an examination of Thucydides and bits of Xenophon and Herodotus accounts of the Peloponnesian War told in a non-chronological manner. It instead groups events into categories such as Horse/Walls/Armor etc.. and then examining events using this aspect it represents.

This is good reading and a well written account of the war and I enjoyed and learned quite a bit from it, this being said if you do not know the history of the war and have never read Thucydides it might be a bit of a go as it jumps around a lot and assumes you know at least the general timeline of the war. I enjoyed it and think its a worthwhile read.

3.5. Great research. Good information. In organizing by theme lots of repetition. Would benefit from a bit more storytelling.

I liked it. It's a thematic, non-linear history of the Peloponnesian War.

Excellent analysis on the Peloponnesian War, the author does a comprehensive assessment of the conflict, it's multiple phases, elements and how they parallel other conflicts in different time periods. It's an extensive but rewarding book.