Carnage and Culture, written by Victor David Hanson, is a very informative and intellectually honest work that was capable of tackling some of the touchiest subjects regarding the history of Western warfare by professors and historical authors alike. Also taking a method which has been seen to be somewhat loathed by critics, he has made Carnage and Culture work in such a fashion that Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Women and War wrote that, ˜ Hanson is courting controversy again with another highly readable, lucid work Together with John Keegan, he is our most interesting historian of war[Jea01].' His work is written differently in the sense that it does not inherently have any relation to the dark hearts and minds of humans and their reasons for war and battle, but rather the science of warfare, and all of the tactics and underlying explanations involving government politics and discipline in warfare. The information that Hanson has gathered and compiled delves into the deep roots and unique qualities as to why the western societies have been such a super power over the rest of the world. Hanson continues on into Carnage and Culture by depicting where the start of the Western way of war was and how it came about. It started around 2500 years ago in the Greek Empire. Cyrus the Younger hired 10 700 Greek Hoplite soldiers to help press his claim to the Persian throne, and they managed to battle their way over more than 1500 miles and make it back home to Greece. They did this with little to no contact with Greece, instead striving through their own discipline and officers diplomacy. This gave them the name of a "marching democracy " [Han01]. They made it through the savage 1,500 miles with what is now known as Shock Battle, which the method is of intricately trained, heavily armed, soldiers with an amount of discipline not seen anywhere else at that time, battling face to face with enemies of any sort.
