Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic!, 5 Jun 2003
I bought this book after reading the many glowing reviews on Amazon.com (the USA version of this site) and am very pleased I did. This is a great book if you want to read about Nelson as a man and a warrior but not about his love life (except when and how it impacts on his fighting and commanding). This is a book about Nelson's "way of war", written by a leading military academic with obvious expertise in analysing all facets of combat, including morale, fear, maneuver, coalition building, leadership, human resource management, fighting ashore, tactics, strategy, and so on. This may well be the best book on Nelson at war written in decades. It is certainly the most innovative and thought-generating. Great read by a top-notch scholar who makes even dry subjects gripping.
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46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I like this author's work, and this is his best book., 4 Jul 2003
By A Customer
This is the third book by Joel Hayward I have read, and I have rated them all five stars. That puts him in my small list of historians (Ambrose, Hibbert, Keegan, Chandler, Pocock) who can actually analyse intensively, say something original and simultaneously write with grace and style. This book will be read and discussed by all Lord Nelson enthusiasts, from professional historians to buffs like me. This writer makes new claims about our favourite admiral, and shows us for the first time in depth that Nelson was not a very good soldier (actually, he was quite poor) but was a very good multi-national commander. He shows us that, while Nelson was devoutly Christian, and Anglican to boot, he formed easy and strong rapports with Catholic leaders and commanders and, (personally for me of great interest) with Muslim rulers and their officers. With considerable mastery of warfare's history, strategies and tactics, he shows us that Nelson's 'warfighting style' closely resembles that now promoted by western armed forces as 'best practice'. As such, he demonstrates something that we've instictively believed: that Nelson still has positive and genuine relevance to today's armed forces. New questions; new answers. The book is full of them. But the author isn't dogmatic and says he hopes merely to encourage a little bit of fresh debate about an over-narrated life. I believe the author will indeed prompt debate, but not in an unkind or unprofessional fashion. His lively theses will merely make us ponder the validity of some long-held views, and when we disagree with those advanced in his compelling book it won't be because he's done something wrong, but because he's done something right: he has thought outside the square (as they say) and made us do so too.
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
best book ever written on a single commander's way of war, 2 Jul 2003
I have long studied command and leadership as a hobby, having been a US Marine Corps colonel before leaving for the world of science. I have never before read a book like this: that stunningly cuts to the core of what made Lord Nelson so extraordinarily successful as a leader of men. This isn't a biography and doesn't waste pages on unnecessary narrative. This is an analysis of the very highest order, explaining, explaining and explaining some more. In my view this original and stimulating book has set the standard for all such studies of commanders, and should be emulated by writers on Lee, Grant, Rommel, Wolfe, Schwarzkopf, and others.
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