Battles that Changed History

The book is in perfect condition - better than described. Great seller!

Great book with 6 to 8 pages in large print and includes single battle map. Also has some details about different goals and countries involved with the fighting. This book is perfect to wet your appetite to read more.

This is a really interesting book that can give a person all possible information on a important battle in history. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone!

My son is very happy with this purchase. He had read it all through and keeps using it for reference with his war discussions.

Only complaint is list of battles. But how many history buffs have the same list?

If the title of this book were "Famous Battles from History, Featuring Europeans and Americans", I would give it 5 stars. By a rough count, I only found 6 battles out of 47 in the book that did not include Americans or Europeans. Also, "Key Battles That Shaped the Fates of Nations" included battles won the armies that ended up losing the wars, so those battles really didn't affect the history of that nation. Now...that all being said, the book does a fine job covering rather famous battles. The graphics, maps and art are all top notch and wonderfully inserted into the story flow.

The main thing about "Battles That Changed History" that I find of interest are the basic backgrounds of these battles and the pen-and-ink drawings made for this book (or rather the smaller volumes that were put together under one cover for this book). It is a far from a good history book and has many flaws as a book on its purported subject. This is the kind of thing that makes me think people set far too low a standard in teaching history.First of all there are no such overall guides as a glossary of technical terms, a bibliography, any sourcing or footnoting, or even any author but only an editor. It includes many illustrations of battles and historical figures that are anachronistic (idealized illustrations from the 19th century mostly I think) but probably chosen because they can be found on lline and are in the Public Domain. The two-page color charts that are supposed to illustrate the battles are often incomprehensible and the texts describing these battles contain a great deal of conjecture)..It includes famous incidents and one-sided encounters that were not really battles (Charge of the Light Brigade, Pearl Harbor, Desert Storm and the Gulf War - the one that is still on). China, India, Japan Korea, Africa and South America barely exist in this editor's world view, not even in coverage of the Pacific campaign in WWII major turning points are left out (Iwo Jima, Saipan, Guadacanal, the Coral Sea, Midway, etc.). Some truly history-making battles are left out - Zama, Lepanto, Culloden, the Seige of Khartoum, the taking of the Golan by Israel, Tobruk, the Battle of Long Island, several battles in Afghanistan, the Zulu Wars, and... I could go on.The last two chapters are about our two wars in Iraq. The account tries to justify both wars and the graphics clearly demonstrate how one-sided both invasions were. There's a political agenda here.In short this is an attractive coffee table book and contains some interesting background on military technology and tactics, which is why I am still reading the book. As history it is very poorly done. Even as a book on military matters it is lacking. The book has its value but it should not make the reader feel he knows something about history because he read the book.