Reviews for Soldier saints and holy warriors

The average rating for Soldier saints and holy warriors based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-29 00:00:00 Kevin Bickford A study of war in Shakespeare and some other contemporary English plays. England was involved in a long-lasting war against Spain and France in the Netherlands at the time, partly imperial and partly religious, as well as imperialist violence in Ireland. It is good to be reminded of the chronology, which I wasn't aware of, but this book focuses on the more superficial aspects of war. It is more about what the reality did to the rhetoric than what the rhetoric did to the reality. The chapters each follow a common theme - disabled veterans, geometry and cartography, the theatricality of war, rumor and boasting, ghosts - through a variety of texts, jumping constantly between plays, news pamphlets, and military textbooks. The last chapter takes a closer look at the interplay between public war and private revenge in the various versions of Hamlet. I think the most valuable parts were the conceptual framework of that last chapter and some comments in the first one on the tension between attributing the cause of war to God or to human nature, which is a distinction that looks relevant to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I read a few months ago, as well.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-07 00:00:00 Michael Yamada A first rate book on how speculative fiction about future wars has shaped the social imaginary of those wars, distorted the ability to anticipate real wars, and also in many cases shaped the actual development of new military technologies. It begins with the 1871 story "The Battle of Dorking" by George Tomkyns Chesney, which imagined the possibility of a German invasion of Britain akin to the crushing defeat that France has just suffered at the hands of the Prussian military a few months earlier. Gannon then proceeds to create a typology of SF on war: "These might be labeled the 'political future-war narratives' since they are inevitably cautionary tales that offered learned opinions -- and instruction -- on the consequences of pursuing one line of national policy over another." The Chesney story was in this vein. "The second variety of future-war narrative emerges later, in the 1880s, and it might be reasonably labeled the 'technological future-war narrative.' These tales offered opinions and instruction also; their lessons were not in policy but engineering." (11) These two models have remained down to the present day. Victorian and Edwardian future-war tales were often much less flawed iubn their tactical and technological particulars than they were in their overarching strategic and operational visions -- and as such, they helped forge a complacency that Gannon suggests primed Britain for the failure to anticipate the disaster of the Great War. Although written nearly tewenty years ago the book closes with a discussion of how visions of AI also becomes visions for the possibility of new forms of war. Here I found the discussion quite inspiring. Coders speak of the "extensibility" of a piece of software, that is, the interfaces of a platform that enable the addition of features or customizations, beyond what the original coders imagined. The advent of AI suggests the extensibility of intelligence itself. For example: AI-powered navigation systems both anticipate & shape the motility of masses of people moving through urban space, based not only on real-time GPS-powered measurement but also on algorithmic anticipations of where people will want to go and when. This is a new kind of awareness: the city itself become "artificially" intelligent, beyond any individual human within it ' a novel form of intelligence that anticipates, integrates & supersedes the navigational intelligence of the humans whose "choices" it increasingly guides.