Battle Winning Strategies or Maybe Not

Overy, Richard.  A History of War in 100 Battles.  New York, Oxford University Press, 2014.
         ISBN: 9780199390717

 Richard Overy seeks to provide a summary history of war through the ages by focusing on one hundred battles.  He opens with a introductory chapter (The Truth of Battle) and then dives into the battles, placing each in  one of five categories (Leadership, Against the Odds, Innovation, Deception, and In the Nick of Time).  For each battle, he provides a summary of the battle, concentrating on one of the "winning" strategies, and provides a piece of artwork that illustrated the battle or the general.

In each category, Overy cherry-picks the battles that he feels best illustrates the "winning" strategy.  He uses the summary to point out how that strategy lead to victory for one side or the other.  He uses battles from ancient to modern times which brings up the question of sources.  He provides a bibliography of sources used, but does not document which book was used for individual battles. Some of the sources are summaries of campaigns which he mines for quotes rather than battle histories.  He includes some errors of fact in the summaries (for instance the Argentine naval warship General Belgrano being listed as a troopship).   He also equates a campaign and/or war with a battle in regard to The Battle of the Atlantic, The Six Day War, and The Battle of the Falklands. 

Despite the above caveats, A History of War in 100 Battles provides a decent, readable, general history of these one hundred battles.  You do not need to agree with Overy's premises or  conclusions to understand the battles found in this book.