The Essence Of War: Leadership And Strategy From The Chinese Military Classics Paperback – May 12, 2004

Ralph Sawyer covers some great material, but I always have mixed feelings about his commentary.

This is a quoation book. Sawyer divides the book into chapters devoted to specific aspects of warfare. Each chapter seems to attempt to distill esential wisdom regarding the nature of the aspects of war by compiling relevant quotations from the original Chinese texts. This makes the book a good source of quotations on the nature of warfare, but it is not coherent thesis on warfare.