On his book Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins
Cover Interview of January 04, 2011
In a nutshell
Most of the nutshells in this book end up broken: there is much fighting. Song of Wrath tells the story of the origins and course of the Archidamian War between Athens and Sparta (431 BC-421 BC), the first of the several wars that made up ancient Greece’s great Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC).
The subject of the book is strategy and statesmanship, and my purpose is to show that these are grounded in culture—that different societies pursue different objectives in their foreign relations, and pursue them, including in war, in idiosyncratic ways.
The lesson of the book is that culture gets people killed. And some of the aspects of culture that got people killed in ancient Greece are very similar to those that that drive modern states and individuals to violence, especially in Asia and the Middle East.
No less important, Song of Wrath aspires to tell its story well. I intended the book to be literary history as it was known before history became the property of college professors. Song of Wrath was a pleasure to write, and I hope it will be a pleasure to read.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Most of the nutshells in this book end up broken: there is much fighting. Song of Wrath tells the story of the origins and course of the Archidamian War between Athens and Sparta (431 BC-421 BC), the first of the several wars that made up ancient Greece’s great Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC).
The subject of the book is strategy and statesmanship, and my purpose is to show that these are grounded in culture—that different societies pursue different objectives in their foreign relations, and pursue them, including in war, in idiosyncratic ways.
The lesson of the book is that culture gets people killed. And some of the aspects of culture that got people killed in ancient Greece are very similar to those that that drive modern states and individuals to violence, especially in Asia and the Middle East.
No less important, Song of Wrath aspires to tell its story well. I intended the book to be literary history as it was known before history became the property of college professors. Song of Wrath was a pleasure to write, and I hope it will be a pleasure to read.