Lords and Ladies - Discworld 14 - Terry Pratchett

October 9, 2005, 12:00 am

Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear - Russia's war with Japan - Richard Connaughton

October 6, 2005, 12:00 am

Not really sure why I picked this book up. A history of a military conflict that occured 100 years ago that I was vaguely aware of as a pre-curser to the Russian revolution.

This book reveals a war that was undoubtably the first modern war. Massed machine gun fire, artiliary, barbed wire, modern logistics, electronic communications, all came into being, not on the western front, but on the Korean penisula between 1904 and 1905.

This conflict wasn't only significant because it revealed man's new capacity for destruction. It was the first time an eastern power had stood up to a western empire and won. It gave an omminous preview of the new expansionist road that Imperial Japan was travelling, a road that would lead to further horrors in WW2.

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