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I have a love/hate relationship with Victor Davis Hanson. Oft times I read his work and cannot help but exclaim the brilliance of his ideas. Other times I read his work and cannot help throwing his junk across the room. Carnage and Culture belongs in the second category. Before I attack Carnage and Culture straight-out, I should probably mention the good aspects of this work. Hanson, like always, has written an engaging book. It is highly readable, and though Hanson turns a tad repetitive before his work is done, he moves at a pace fast enough to work around his own cyclical thought process. Carnage and Culture's bibliography is suitably large for the subject matter. Indeed, Hanson's greatest triumph lies in his ability to translate his survey of the extensive historical literature surrounding his subject into terms readily understood by a high school graduate. That the reader does not need any previous knowledge concerning Archimedean Persia, Aztec "Flower Wars", or the naval tactics of the Second World War to understand the arguments presented in Carnage and Culture is a testament to Hanson's place as a master historical writing. Yet it is the sheer readability and inclusiveness of the book that troubles me. Carnage and Culture does not encourage further investigation of the events, ideas, or peoples discussed. Only rarely does Hanson admit that there are gaps or biases in the historical literature, and never does he stop to acknowledge that many of the arguments that he is making are controversial and contested. For Hanson, events are not subject to uncertainty; each historical occurrence is another piece of evidence perfectly placed to support his irrefutable thesis: the West has bested the rest because Western culture makes them the best soldiers on the field of battle. The problem with this thesis is that much of the evidence used by Hanson is not very good evidence at all. Consider this statement found midway through the first chapter, "the Ottomans transferred their capital to the European Constantinople.... [but] the opposite was not true: the Crusaders did not transfer the capital of France or England to a conquered Tyre or Jerusalem" (11). This sentence is wrongheaded on two counts: 1. The magnetism of Constantinople and Jerusalem is irrelevant in a discussion of Western and "Islamic" lethality. While throwing this statement out does support the notion that Western culture is more sophisticated or impressive than Islamic culture, it does nothing to support Hanson's thesis that Westerners are more deadly than their neighbors. 2. This is a blatant distortion of history. While the facts presented in this sentence are true, the implied lesson of Hanson's words, "Westerners do not transfer their capitals into cities of non-Western cultures" is not true. When the Normans conquered Muslim Sicily, they moved their capital to Palermo. In time Tulaytulah, pride of Al-Andalus, was to become Toledo, capital of the Spanish Empire. Perhaps I am being unfair to Hanson by picking out one bad sentence and dissecting it at length. After all, this deconstruction does not disprove Hanson's thesis, nor cast any of his central points into doubt. By itself, it is nothing -- but the dozen such disingenuous statements found in each chapter make me question the validity of Hanson's argument all together. Carnage and Culture reads as a thesis-first book; instead of assessing the full scope of historical evidence and then developing a contention, Hanson devised a thesis and then looked for sources and incidents that supported his case. A fair example of Hanson's selective use of history can be found in the people whose words he chooses to include in his work. Hanson quotes Herodotus' and Aeschylus' accounts of the battle of Salamis at length, but he refuses to take contemporary Spanish explanations of their victory against the Mexica seriously. Hanson offers no reason for why we should trust the Greeks' word but not the conquistadors', but the rationale behind his decision is clear enough. The Greeks state that freedom is the reason they beat back the Persians, while the Spaniards claim that their Christian faith and superior intelligence was the reason they rode to victory. The first explanation supports Hanson's thesis; the second explanation is antithetical to it. Thus, in Hanson's words, the Greeks "draw clear moral lessons" (47) about their wars, while the Spaniards "incorrectly attributed" (208) the reasons for triumph. This double standard is most apparent during the chapters on Pointers and Lepanto, both taken from periods where the West was lagging behind the rest. When the victors of Lepanto wrote tracts thanking God for bringing them victory, they were following the path of their Western forbearers, possessors of a free and open intellectual tradition. But when those who lost at Lepanto (or Pointers) write that the battle's verdict was Allah's will, and Hanson condemns them for failing to produce "analysis... concerning shortcomings in the sultan's equipment, command, and naval organization" (251). Fallacious accounts of Western battles that blamed uncontrollable factors for defeat (such as the "sandstorm" invented by Greek historians to justify the Byzantine defeat at Yarmuk) are never mentioned. Like the sandstorm-inventing Greeks, Hanson goes to great lengths to explain away Western defeats during the Middle Ages. The Arabs were only successful because they were fighting an "overextended" Byzantium and "barbarian" Visigoths. Hanson goes so far as to call the 20 or so Arab victories between Yarmuk and Pointers a "reconquista" (146) - an absurd idea when one pauses to reflect that cities like Alexandria, Carthage, Syracuse, and Nicosia had been part of the Western world longer than Paris or London have existed. Likewise, Hanson offers the Crusades as an example of Western military might, noting that Europe was "strong enough" (168) to send thousands of soldiers to the Holy Land, but the Arabs were never able to field armies in France or England. Statements like these take confrontations between Europeans and Arabs out of their proper historical context - with the exception of the First, the crusades were a dismal strategic failure for the Europeans, not a triumph of arms to be championed as evidence of Western lethality. Furthermore, Hanson never stops to justify why comparisons such as this are fair game at all; lacking the religious impetus of the Crusaders, for what reason should the Mamluks have sent an Arab army to invade Languedoc or Lombardy when the hoards of the Mongol Empire lie at their door? Hanson continues this selective view of history in the run up and aftermath of Lepanto. Like the Arab victories in the 600s and 700s, the ascendancy of the Ottoman Empire is explained away as the result of an ailing Byzantine state. This may be true, but it does not explain how the Ottomans were able to defeat Crusader coalitions containing Europe's finest knights not once, but three times during the same period.* Likewise, Lepanto was not the first naval confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League - the Ottoman's victory at Djerba (1560) and Preveza (1538) are not accounted for. Only the Ottoman defeat fits within the confines of Hanson's thesis, and only an Ottoman defeat is included. With that said, the choice of Lepanto as one of Carnage and Culture's key battles was an extremely poor one. Hanson neglects to mention that Lepanto was a strategic failure; the goals of the Holy League's fleet were the protection and recapture of Cyprus. Yet a year after Lepanto the Ottoman fleet would be larger and more advanced than it had been a year before, Cyprus would still lay in Ottoman hands, Venice, fearing for survival, would withdraw from the Holy League, and subsequent engagements of the Ottoman and Holy League's fleet in the Peloponnese would lead to nothing more than a protracted stalemate. When Western armies are decimated in defeats that have little strategic bearing for the loser (Cannae, Isandlwanda, Pearl Harbor), Hanson heralds them as clear examples of the superiority of Western citizen-soldiers and economic practice. Yet when the Ottomans make just as miraculous of a recovery - effectively nullifying the strategic consequences of the greatest defeat ever forced upon the Empire since the time of Tamerlane - Hanson fails to make sweeping claims about the power of the Ottoman command economy. I have no doubt that Hanson would discard this list of inconsistencies in his work as readily as he has cast aside the "flood of minutia" (463) sent to him by other academics following the publication of this book. After all, myy criticism has focused on the area of history I am most familiar with, and my concerns only knock down two chapters out of eleven. This is not enough to invalidate the book altogether. Yet if Hanson's treatment of the other 1,500 years discussed in Carnage and Culture is as disingenuous as his coverage of the of the Arab and Ottoman worlds, then this book has no valid argument contained in its covers. If the Devil lies in the details, Hanson is haunted by too many devils to make an honest case. *Nikopol 1396, Varna 1444, and Mohacs 1526.