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The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great | 
 enlarge | Author: Steven Pressfield
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $8.35
You Save: $6.65 (44%)
New (18) Used (24) from $6.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 64624
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0553382055
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553382051
ASIN: 0553382055
Publication Date: September 27, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. So begins Alexander’s extraordinary confession on the eve of his greatest crisis of leadership. By turns heroic and calculating, compassionate and utterly merciless, Alexander recounts with a warrior’s unflinching eye for detail the blood, the terror, and the tactics of his greatest battlefield victories. Whether surviving his father’s brutal assassination, presiding over a massacre, or weeping at the death of a beloved comrade-in-arms, Alexander never denies the hard realities of the code by which he lives: the virtues of war. But as much as he was feared by his enemies, he was loved and revered by his friends, his generals, and the men who followed him into battle. Often outnumbered, never outfought, Alexander conquered every enemy the world stood against him–but the one he never saw coming. . . .
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| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
 Interesting for students of military history or war gaming enthusiasts December 22, 2008
This is essentially a book for enthusiasts of military history, war gaming and the like.
It has little character development and hardly explores the personal side or event the political processes of Alexander's empire building.
It essentially deals with Alexander's consolidation of his control of Greece, his defeat Darius and the Persian Empire and his Indian Campaign.
It misses out parts and is not a complete saga.
Nonetheless it does somewhat explore Alexander's mind from a romantic perspective.It deals with his conversation with Indian Prince Porus, and Alexander's admiration for Persian Emperor Darius.
The book is simply too short to cover Alexander's life and career.
I would suggest, unless you are looking for details of battles and military strategy, you look elsewhere for a good novel about Alexander the Great.
 A great book December 18, 2008
First of all I would like to say that I thought this was a really good book. If you have any interest in Alexander the Great or any great leaders in history then this is a good book for you. This book is pretty much a biography of Alexander's life. It is a fictional biography and has many interesting details that are made up by the author. Don't get me wrong this does have many true facts about him.
One thing that I really like that the author put in here was the real facts about Alexander. This may be a fictional book but the real facts do make it better. When the author did put fictional parts in the book he made it very believable. He made it so the fictional things fit the time and place of the story. Also he made it so that they fit the personality of the characters.
The author of the book is Steven Pressfield. He did a great job of writing this book. He has written many other books. Another book that you may know about is "The gates of fire." It is also a fictional biography book. In conclusion I thought this was a really good book written by a very good author and I would recommend it to anyone.
Alexander The Obsessed November 16, 2008
This is my third, but not last, Pressfield historical novel on the ancient Greeks. Not as good as Gates of Fire, but better than Tides of War. He is much more focused here, moving the history along at a brisk pace, using his typical first person account of events. But this time the first person is Alexander himself, not just an observer.
According to Pressfield's lights, the protagonist starts out a decent, wise leader and great military tactician, gradually over the years becoming a maniacal killer of friends as well as enemies, infatuated with his destiny as Lord of the Persian Empire and India. The battle scenes and speeches, as always, are lyrical and captivating. Read Pressfield.
The Ultimate, Intimate Company of Men July 12, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dear readers don't forget that this book is a novel, historical fiction, and so, to argue about the pros and cons of anything undocumented about Alexander the Great some 2,300 years ago is a bit absurd.
But, let's delve into the absurd anyway. It's almost never disputed today that Alexander was indisputably bi-sexual and perhaps 100% homosexual. He has become a modern day gay icon. Alexander was a man who spent his entire (short) life day-in-day-out exclusively in the intimate company of men.
Yet, Steven Pressfield's "Virtues of War" skirts Alexander's sexual identity with unwelcome obliviousness, except for blunt suggestions and veiled images of intimacy between Alexander and Hephaestion - and other younger men under his careful tutelage. Alexander frequently comments about the astonishing beauty of young men. Pressfield's indirect acknowledgement of Alexander's' homosexuality is this: Hephaestion is mentioned in Alexander's own voice by name and deed approximately 9,000 times in this 350 page novel, in contrast to the scant 200 or 300 words devoted to Alexander's relationship with any woman, including his mother and the 2 women he "married." What price would Pressfield have paid for actual acknowledgement of what everyone actually now understands? No price at all. In fact some good old m2m sex would have given a very welcome and healthy jolt to the painfully over-explained military tactics pages (and pages and pages) to say nothing of the boring lists (and lists and lists) of generals, captains and so on.
Worse yet, Pressfield cheats us when we do not hear -- in Alexander's own voice -- his overwhelming grief and loss when Hephaestion dies, or hear Alexander's own agony and confessions as death overtook him. Why let another narrator in an "epilogue" tell us "about" those crucial moments that would have honestly portrayed the inner Alexander? The terribly disappointing ending of the book is a huge flaw. I really did want to read Alexander's own words, not Itanes, when Hephestion dies, and I really wanted to hear Alexander confess on his death bed that he was homosexual. What a let-down at the end! Yuck!
Two deaths define and punctuate Alexander's life. First was Bucephalus' death - his beloved massive 21-year old horse. Second was Hephaestion's, whose demise literally devastated Alexander, causing a life-changing upheaval and loss, something from which Alexander never recovered. Page 341, "yet, from the death of Hephaestion, he was never the same man." Why? His spouse was dead. Interestingly, the death of his father is almost inconsequential.
But make no mistake. This is an epic novel of epic scope about the epic star-power character of all time. Pressfield shows Alexander as a fascinatingly powerful man, an immense historical figure, the subject of countless literary works. This one - Alexander as the central character in a novel - is excellent. However, there is no denouement, no final crisis, no real mystery, no wonderment, no surprise, and no suspense. Just the end -- before he dies!
Alexander's "daimon," the mystical magical will to fight, his internal warrior persona, his soul and driving conscience and life force, seems never to fail him until near the end when Telemon tells
Alexander, Page 312, "The daimon is inhuman." Indeed it is possible, Pressfield suggests, that the internal Alexander was evil. Such are the things of legends.
The book's structure is excellent with Alexander narrating his own story in first person - his fictional voice, as he instructs Itanes in the virtues of war. Thus, we are not spared any detail of Alexander's internal musings, his conflicts and motivations (except noted above about his own defining sexuality). The horrors of war back then are spread before us in great detail by Alexander himself. The reader is awe-struck by the logistical accomplishments involved in moving and sustaining an army of hundreds of thousands of men through harsh territory over 8 years and 11,250 miles.
Alexander is brutal and unyielding, brilliant and belligerent, and almost always --with rare exceptions even with all his apparent insight -- fully able, easily and completely, to blame others for his own mistakes, murders and failures -- or the unanticipated consequences of his victories. Page 188, "My envoys sought to make the leading men of Tyre and Gaza see reason; I dispatched letters beneath my own hand. I pledged to make their cities richer, freer, safer. Still they resisted. They compelled me to make examples of them." Thus, he drove his men to the "end of the known world" to further his mega maniacal ambitions, for better or worse. His ability to motivate men to kill for him is astonishing.
To have achieved a readable novel, given a lack of plot or true story line, Pressfield gives us a good read. Not great, but well worth your time, if you are a Greekophile. Was Alexander "great?" Who knows and who cares!! He's always a good read!
 a little too intraverted and hard to understand the battles June 21, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
not sure i will actually get through this book as it is highly technical on the battle strategy and tactics and a little too much in the head of Alexander, which I am not sure how the author got there. There isn't much history written about Alexander's inner thoughts.
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