In From Here to Eternity, Jon Meacham looks at Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book, Ripples of Battle. But first he tips his hat to An Autumn of War:
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, horrified by the news from the East Coast, Victor Davis Hanson began writing. A classicist and farmer in California, Hanson kept at it everyday through that momentous fall, ultimately publishing his thoughts and pieces in a small but highly influential book entitled An Autumn of War. The collection’s overarching (and, to me, convincing) theme: that war is an inherent element of the human condition and that the wisest course in a fallen world–one in which evil can strike out at innocents, without warning, on a brilliantly blue morning, widowing spouses and orphaning children–is to appreciate the tragic quality of life. Once we accept that the world will almost always fall short of our expectations, that man is not perfectible, and that answering violence with violence is sometimes the moral thing to do, we can start to make ourselves, our children, and our culture more secure. Hanson’s book was read at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
I’ll probably have to read both books.