Books Received

General

America’s Army: A Model for Interagency Effectiveness. By Zeb B. Bradford, Jr. and Frederic J. Brown. Westport, Conn.: Praeger International Security, 2008. ISBN 978-0-313-35024-5. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 250. $49.95. This team produced The U.S. Army in Transition in 1973; in this book, they argue that the new army—improved since their last volume—can serve as a model for all kinds of government security programs, not just military ones.

Combat: A Neglected Area of Military History. An Investigation into Eye-Witness Reports from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the First World War (1914–18). By Stefan Felleckner. Translated by John Murdoch. Berlin, Germany: Pro Business, 2006. ISBN 978-3-939000-87-6. Battle plans. Notes. Pp. 140. Paper. €15.95. The title of this brief work is misleading; what the authors seek to do is narrate “what actually took place in the fighting” without reference to any further context or analysis.

Hell Hath No Fury: True Stories of Women at War from Antiquity to Iraq. By Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross. New York: Crown Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-34637-7. Index. Pp. xx, 395. Paper. $14.95. The authors offer an ecelectic collection of sketches of hellions mythical and real: from Amazons to Molly Pitcher to Mata Hari to Tammy Duckworth.

Mathematics and War. Edited by Marnhelm Booß-Bavnbek and Jens Høyrup. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2003. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. References. Pp. viii, 416. Paper. An International Meeting on Mathematics and War in Sweden in 2002 produced these twenty papers; some are predictable discourses on technology and war; some are rocket science esoterica. Bring your calculator.

Nation-Building and Stability Operations: A Reference Handbook. By Cynthia A. Watson. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2008. ISBN 978-0-275-99218-7. Glossary. Appendix. Resources. Index. Pp. xvi, 153. $55.00. A senior professor at the National War College notes the increasing importance of nation building as a legitimate role for the United States and offers observations on the nature of the process and prescriptions for its successful implementation.

Nationalism in the New World. Edited by Don H. Doyle and Marco Antonio Pamplona. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8023-2820-0. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Index. Pp. 315. Paper. $22.95. A series of essays offer a comparison of nationalism and the independence experiences of the countries of the Americas both as distinctive New World phenomena and as models for the emerging modern world.

Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army. By João Resende-Santos. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-68965-6. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. Pp. xii, 321. Paper. $29.99. The author uses three case studies from the Southern Cone—Argentina, Brazil and Chile—to argue that military institutions emulate successful international models and create themselves not according to national ideals but in response to their “external security environment.”

Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism. By Michael C. Desch. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8018-8801-4. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. Pp. x, 232. $45.00. Democracies may have been generally triumphant in wars over non-democratic powers since 1815, but ideology is not the reason; cold material superiority is.

The United States, NATO, and a New Multilateral Relationship. By Frank R. Douglas. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International 2008. ISBN 978-0-313-34476-3. Maps. Tables. Charts. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 237. $75.00. Eisenhower’s fear that the U.S. would be trapped into a permanent military presence in Europe after World War II proved true until the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union; now the U.S. faces the challenge of reconstituting NATO based on a different, multilateral model and with a new purpose.

Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth Nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence. By Leigh A. Payne. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8223-4082-9. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvi, 374. Paper. $23.95. Public confessions and truth commissions have not brought relief or closure in places...