War: How Conflict Shaped Us

"As editor of Five Books, I have access to Google Analytics and get a glimpse what people do and do not like reading about. Paradoxically, while military history and military strategy are popular subjects, war is not. It was funny to find, when I started reading Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan’s latest book, her making a similar observation. To attract students, she was encouraged to change a course she was teaching on “war and society” to “a history of peace” instead. War: How Conflict Shaped Us is a book compiled out of her Reith Lectures ( you can also listen to the lectures here ) and investigates various aspects of humanity and its relationship to war. As one would expect from a book based on lectures, it’s a quick read, and gives a good sweep of the subject, but lacks the granularity to be fully satisfying. But Margaret MacMillan is a leading historian, an expert on World War I (amongst other things), and it’s great to be taken on a tour of such a critical subject, pointing out the paradoxes and contradictions of war along the way. It’s a book to reread and take notes on. While on the subject of war, another of the books on my to-be-read pile for 2020 is Missionaries by Phil Klay, whose writing comes highly recommended by our US editor Eve Gerber. It’s a novel about US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan fighting in Colombia. Klay is a veteran of the US Marine Corps, and fiction seems to be one of the few ways ex-soldiers seem to be able to write directly about their experience, so I’m cheating and including it here under nonfiction."