Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare
Paul Lockhart’s Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warefare is, and go with me on this for a minute, the perfect military history beach-read. Sure, does the idea of reading about wave after wave of bloodied pikemen charging into musket fire inspire thoughts of romantic sunsets over the Caribbean? Perhaps not to many. But then again not everyone is a military history buff. If you are like me, though, what you will immediately love about this non-fiction work of history is that you can either read it straight through or piece by piece. What I truly enjoyed about this book is how it goes into minute detail but remains very readable. You might get engrossed in a section on artillery and read two-hundred pages in two hours. Or you might read one chapter in a commuter flight from Chicago to Milwaukee. It does not matter. The narrative remains engaging whether you read the book straight through or part by part. All in all, I have to give this excellent book a perfect score.
Score: 5/5