Military Strategy of the Soviet Union A History Book

This is a bad book. That doesn't change the fact that Cartledge is an eminent authority on Sparta and uniquely well-qualified from a research perspective to write this book. The demands of academic history, however, are not the same as those for a book produced for general consumption. This volume fails on at least three counts. First, tone. Were this a text for scholars, Cartledge would be well within his rights to write in the querulous, self-defensive tone he sometimes takes here. A general history presents settled matters to an intelligent but not necessarily specialist audience. Such a readership is not interested in the arcana of specialist debates over issues; they just want the facts, such as they are. If the facts are in dispute, a frank explanation and a clear position taken are what general history requires. Cartledge can't forgo playing swift rounds of 'cover my ass' on specialist debates that the general reader doesn't know and certainly can't be brought to care about. Such defensive gestures, if they were deemed truly necessary, should have been relegated to end notes or a more expansive set of appendices. Second, the book fails in terms of structure. A general history ought to tell an interesting story well. Given the resuscitation of interest in Sparta, in no small part because of films like _The 300_ but also because of a general fascination with the topic in the West, Cartledge doesn't have to work hard to make his choice of topic exciting. All he really has to do is get out of the way and tell the story clearly. If he can add new facts to well-worn stories (like that of Thermopylae) so much the better. The organization of this particular narrative is a disaster. The history of Sparta is divided into three periods (roughly): everything up to Thermopylae, the period of Spartan hegemony through the Peloponnesian war, and the long dissolution thereafter under the Macedonians and finally the Romans. Nothing wrong with that in principle. But the story is never told in anything like a straightforward manner. Instead, Cartledge loops forward and backward in time, dipping like a swallow into any topic that strikes him as important from moment to moment, without conveying to the reader the purpose of the digressions. One would be hard pressed from this volume to put together a coherent account of the rise, dominion and fall of Sparta. Worse, Cartledge sees fit to lard his general narrative with potted histories (mostly taken from Plutarch or Xenophon or other ancient sources) of characters he deems important. Most of the mini-biographies add little to the source material. They interrupt the flow of the overall narrative and very often repeat information conveyed two or more times elsewhere in the book. Sometimes these mini-bios are built on nothing more than a single line of reported dialogue--very flimsy scaffolding to base a 'biography' on, particularly when the larger purpose of the biography in the overall narrative isn't clear to begin with. Thirdly, this fails at the level of the sentence and paragraph. Cartledge's looping organizational style filters down to the level of the sentence, where he frequently burdens forthright statements with one qualifying clause after another. His editors have badly let him down, at times allowing him to produce sentences that are barely grammatical, with unclear referents. At other times the text is repetitive. We learn twice in two paragraphs that Augustus was known as Octavian, for instance. All of this adds up to a maddening volume. Set pieces that should have been gems in the crown of this story (the heroic defense at Thermopylae) lose luster in Cartledge's infuriating prose style. Mostly this is just kind of ineffective stuff which is depressing. But the final chapter, on hunting, turns into a nasty little set piece designed to take Roger Scruton out to the shed for daring to compare foxhunting to Spartan boar-hunting. I hold no brief for foxhunting, but surely Scruton is allowed to put the two things together if he wishes (despite his snarkiness, Cartledge provides no compelling reason why the two things can't be at least contrasted). Cartledge's final chapter thus leaves a nasty taste after a largely unedifying slog through history. Not recommended at all.