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In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and
social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of
human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the
frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal
mastery from the crossbow--banned by the Church in 1139 as too
lethal for Christians to use against one another--to the nuclear
missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the
seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial
complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial
transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused
military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well
as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests
McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of
large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the
problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer
breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears
and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."
"No summary can do justice to McNeill's intricate, encyclopedic
treatment. . . . McNeill's erudition is stunning, as he moves
easily from European to Chinese and Islamic cultures and from
military and technological to socio-economic and political
developments. The result is a grand synthesis of sweeping
proportions and interdisciplinary character that tells us almost as
much about the history of butter as the history of guns. . . .
McNeill's larger accomplishment is to remind us that all humankind
has a shared past and, particularly with regard to its choice of
weapons and warfare, a shared stake in thefuture."--Stuart
Rochester, "Washington Post Book World"
"Mr. McNeill's comprehensiveness and sensitivity do for the reader
what Henry James said that Turgenev's conversation did for him:
they suggest 'all sorts of valuable things.' This narrative of
rationality applied to irrational purposes and of ingenuity
cannibalizing itself is a work of clarity, which delineates
mysteries. The greatest of them, to my mind, is why human beings
have never learned to cherish their own species."--Naomi Bliven,
"The New Yorker
"
The Winfields discuss the language of Byzantine church decoration,
methods of plastering, proportional rules, system of coloring, and
working methods of the Byzantine painter.
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