Army History journal on Clausewitz 1799 Vol 1: "engaging and interactive"

Professor Murray has just alerted me to another recent review of one of our Clausewitz translations, "Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1". The generous reviewer this time is LTC Tom Vance, writing in Army History journal. I thank LTC Vance for his thorough and fair review. The full review can be found in JSTOR. Favourable comments include:

"With 509 footnotes accompanying Clausewitz’s original 39 notes, Murray and Pringle have created an engaging book within this translation."

"Clausewitz’s text and Murray and Pringle’s commentary and analysis are so seamless that it is easy to forget whose voice you are reading"

and a nicely backhanded finish:

"their book requires studying, not just reading. However, the effort is worth it. Their commentary is easy to follow, and the cross-referencing creates an engaging and interactive experience [...]. When you are finished, however, you feel like you have earned several professional military education credits."

Go on - buy the book, enjoy an engaging experience and earn yourself some PME credits!

A couple of previous reviews of the 1799 works are reported here and here.

"Hungary 1849" reviewed: "a cracking read"!

I was delighted today to see the first review of my recently published book, "Hungary 1849: The Summer Campaign". I am obliged to Colin Ashton for reviewing it on his "Carryings On Up The Dale" blog, here.

Colin gave a very generous review to the previous volume, "Hungary 1848: The Winter Campaign". This time he is equally kind. Phrases like "Chris Pringle has again done a superb job" and "a sympathetic translation, forensically researched and presented, and a cracking read to boot!" are calculated to warm any author's heart. (As is giving it five stars on Amazon - thanks, Colin.)

I hope I might have a chance at some wargame show or other such event to express my appreciation to Colin in person, but for now let me publicly thank him here.

H-War on Clausewitz 1799 histories: "highly recommended"

I am delighted to report another highly positive review of our Clausewitz translations* from an authoritative source. This time it is Dr Jonathan Abel of the US Army's Command and General Staff College. In his review published last month on H-War, Dr Abel generously notes:

"[Murray & Pringle's] translation is excellent, no small task for the notoriously difficult-to-translate Clausewitz"

"Their notes also illuminate the connections between the work and On War, making the former an invaluable corollary to the latter"

"Murray and Pringle have provided another vital service in their translation by highlighting a largely forgotten series of campaigns. The 1799 campaigns were the opening salvos in the War of the Second Coalition in Europe, but they have no dedicated, academic account in English."

"an invaluable addition to the field of Clausewitz studies"

"highly recommended"

I am very grateful to Dr Abel for his review.

 

*The books in question:

"Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1"

"The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2"

 

JMH on Clausewitz 1799: "finely translated, annotated, and edited volumes"

Just over a year ago, Professor Nicholas Murray and I published translations of two more volumes of Clausewitz's histories which helped him develop his theories:

"Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1"

"The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2"

These have now been very positively reviewed in the Journal of Military History, Vol.86, No.3, July 2022. JMH's reviewer, Professor Frederick C. Schneid, is kind enough to say Nick and I "continue to produce finely translated, annotated and edited volumes of Carl von Clausewitz's military histories" and "For those scholars who study this era, these volumes will be a wonderful addition to their library". He also mentions our previous volume, "Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign", describing it as "clear, well-presented, and valuable".

I am very grateful to Professor Schneid for his review.

"The entire work is a treat for military specialists and lay readers alike" - Clausewitz 1796 reviewed on H-War

Delighted to see our translation of Clausewitz's history of Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign receive this excellent review by Doina Georgeta Harsanyi (Central Michigan University) for H-War. Some quotes from her assessment of the work:

"Military historians and army officers will find much to enjoy in this theoretician’s take on a well-known sequence of events."

"The narrative is rich in perceptive insights"

"excellent critical apparatus"

"Richly researched footnotes"

"The entire work is a treat for military specialists and lay readers alike"

I am very grateful to Dr Harsanyi for her thorough review and generous comments.

"exceptional, elegant and accessible, masterful, exciting, brilliantly executed, erudite, highly recommended!"

How's that for a string of superlatives? Not my words, but those of Dr Vanya Eftimova Bellinger and Dr Alexander Mikaberidze, extracted from their review comments on the forthcoming book prepared by Professor Nicholas Murray and myself: 

'Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1'.

Dr Eftimova is Assistant Professor of Strategy at the USAF's Air University and author of a biography of Clausewitz's wife, Marie von Clausewitz: The woman behind the making of On War.

Dr Mikaberidze is Professor of History at Louisiana State University Shreveport and author of numerous books on the Napoleonic Wars, including most recently, The Napoleonic Wars: A global history.

I am delighted (and a little overwhelmed) that our work has received such generous praise from such authoritative commentators. I am grateful to Dr Eftimova and Dr Mikaberidze for their kind words.

Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign: "Bravo!"

Dr Konstantinos Travlos has written a nice 'annotated presentation' about the first Clausewitz volume Professor Murray and I translated and edited, 'Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign'.

Konstantinos rightly declares his conflict of interest in that he and I are friends and collaborators, notably on his own excellent wargame campaign book on the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, 'Bloody Big Balkan Battles!'.

Nevertheless, he is a serious scholar of military history and his remarks merit attention. I therefore offer some of them here:

'The editorial job and translation are excellent.'

'The decision to include the notes of an earlier French translator (Colin) is brilliant [...]. It also makes reading the text more interesting as it calls on you to compare what Clausewitz wrote with what Colin and the translators/editors think he wrote.'

'Bravo!'

But I encourage you to read the full presentation, as Konstantinos provides a number of perceptive observations of his own on the lessons Clausewitz teaches.

I am grateful to Konstantinos for his kind words and for his thoughtful discussion of our work. I hope he will enjoy our forthcoming translations of the two volumes on the 1799 campaigns in Italy and Switzerland just as much.

(For other reviews of the 1796 book, see here.)

 

JMH rates our Clausewitz 1796 book 'outstanding'

JMH, the Journal of Military History, is really the premier place to get a positive book review, and Professor Frederick Schneid has kindly provided one. Professor Schneid is a great authority on the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, having published a number of books of his own on this topic.

We were therefore very happy to see his review of our translation of Clausewitz's history of Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign in JMH 84/2 (April 2020). He calls it:

'An outstanding example of smooth translating and erudite editing and annotation. Virtually every page contains textual footnotes to help an unfamiliar reader better understand the detail that Clausewitz's contemporary audience would have understood. [...] Murray & Pringle further provide the reader with current interpretation and detail that makes this particular Clausewitzian history more valuable than the original unexpurgated work.'

Our thanks to Professor Schneid for his kind review.

Clausewitz 1796: "three books in one"

The Michigan War Studies Review has published an enthusiastic review of 'Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign', our edited and translated edition of Clausewitz's history of the campaign. Choice quotes:

'a valuable contribution to the growing body of work involving the erudite Prussian'

'effectively three books in one [viz., the original German manuscript; analysis from the French general staff edition; and Professor Murray's examination of] subjects and passages that anticipate ideas contained in On War.'

'a fine appendix of orders of battles'

'I applaud Nicholas Murray and Christopher Pringle for their salutary, thought-provoking addition to the literature by and about Clausewitz, who remains the model of how to write operational military history'

My thanks to Professor John T. Kuehn for his generous review.
The review is here.
The book itself is here.

We're doing our best to make further salutary and thought-provoking additions to the Clausewitz literature; our manuscripts for two more Clausewitz volumes on the history of the 1799 campaigns in Italy and Switzerland are in press with the University Press of Kansas now.

Vae Victis reviews BBB, BBEB & BBBB

Many readers of this blog may already be familiar with Vae Victis. For those who are not: VV is a gorgeous, lavish, high-quality French wargaming magazine. The publication of Konstantinos Travlos's Bloody Big Balkan Battles campaign book (BBBB) prompted Nicolas Strategos at VV to commission a review not only of BBBB but also of the parent BBB ruleset and its companion BBEB scenario book.

The review is mainly descriptive of the mechanisms and contents, but perhaps I can extract and translate its essential assessment here without committing too many crimes against the French language.

For BBEB, it just lists the wars covered. For BBBB, it goes further:
"The content is extremely educational and provides an excellent synthesis of events."

For the BBB rules:
"Overall, BBB offers a level of abstraction and a scale of game suited to 'big battles', with simple mechanisms and loads of high quality scenarios. Basically it allows you and some good buddies to get together around a standard wargame table and recreate the major 'collisions' of the second half of the 19th century (and the start of the 20th)."

Summary:
"Good points: simple mechanisms, suitable for multi-player games, high quality scenarios.
Flaws: running out of ammunition (this seems a bit excessive and will happen too often during a game)."

My thanks to Nicolas for arranging the review, and to VV's reviewer Jean-Philippe Imbach for doing a thorough job and bringing BBB to the attention of our wargaming comrades across the Channel.

I guess at some point we should do that French-language edition of BBB ...

Nice review of BBB from 'Manteuffel' (Wargaming from the Balcony)

Pleased to stumble across this latest review of BBB, published in May 2019 by 'Manteuffel' on his Wargaming from the Balcony blog. I don't know who Manteuffel is, nor what his balcony overlooks (though some clues elsewhere on the blog suggest he is somewhere in Virginia USA or thereabouts), but I hope he won't mind me picking out a couple of my favourite lines from his review:

"Our group has found the rules as a good and simple system that allows us to play (and finish) battles during the 19th century."

"We often get occasional players, so having a system that they can quickly grasp is a true bonus."

"BBB is what we have been looking for."

"If your looking to play full sized battles in an afternoon with some buddies, BBB just might be for you!"

I'm particularly pleased to see that he and his group have been getting good value out of BBB for Napoleonics, as witness for instance his AAR for the Battle of Gordeczna. As he says:

"We actually find that [we can] use the rules for the later Napoleonic period without modification. We just reduce the unit scale and apply the appropriate unit attributes and the rules fit like a glove. We had been working on our own variations of rules to cover this scale, but are all in agreement that this is not longer necessary, as BBB is what we have been looking for. "

"[BBB is] our current preferred system for to play full sized battles in the 19th century."

Manteuffel, if you're reading this: I appreciate you taking the trouble to write such a thoughtful review, and I'm delighted that you and your group are having such a good time with BBB!

Al Nofi reviews Clausewitz's history of the 1796 campaign

Quite an honour to get this positive review from Al Nofi, a real luminary of military history, of wargame design, and of the serious professional conflict simulation community, on the influential StrategyPage website:
link
"Napoleon's 1796 Campaign is a valuable book for anyone with an interest in the period or in military theory, and arguably one that should be read twice".

"The translation is excellently done"

The first review of our Clausewitz book, by Jerry Lenaburg, has been published in the New York Journal of Books.

Choice quotes:

"The translation is excellently done, with copious footnotes and annotations"
 
"This volume is an excellent companion to On War."