Rating – Two Stars
This is a heavy book. Not in its weight but in its syntax. It’s tedious. This text reads as if it were a doctorial dissertation modified for publication. Here’s one example from page 15:
“For their part, the localised backlashes against the closer imposition of colonial
control that emerged during the war and peaked between 1919 and 1922 were them-
selves interlinked through the cross-border exchange of ideas and inspiration.”
Egad! Say again? Over.
This book focuses on the political, economic, and logistics of the middle-east war. Ulrichsen
mentions campaigns with short shift. Fortunately, he discusses the Gallipoli Campaign in slightly more depth. Nonetheless, for the military historian, this book is unsatisfactory. We are left wanting more detail. In particular, I fault the author for not providing detailed maps of the campaigns he mentions and discusses ever so lightly. He does have one overall map of the Middle East and that’s it. Totally unsatisfactory.
It sounds to be more of the author’s opinion is documented rather than the details a historian would wish to chronicle?