A Rage to Conquer

Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History

By: Michael Walsh

Narrated by: Michael Walsh

Award-winning author Michael Walsh looks at twelve momentous battles that changed the course of Western history.

A sequel to Michael Walsh’s Last Stands, his new book A Rage to Conquer is a journey through the twelve of the most important battles in Western history. As Walsh sees it, war is an important facet of every culture—and, for better or worse, our world is unthinkable without it. War has been an essential part of the human condition throughout history, the principal agent of societal change, waged by men on behalf of, and in pursuit of, their gods, women, riches, power, and the sheer joy of combat.

In A Rage to Conquer, Walsh brings history to life as he considers a group of courageous commanders and the battles they waged that became crucial to the course of Western history. He looks first at Carl Von Clausewitz, the seminal thinker in the Western canon dealing with war. He then moves on to Achilles at Ilium, Alexander at Gaugamela, Caesar at Alesia, Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, Aetius at the Catalaunian Plains, Bohemond at Dorylaeum and Antioch, Napoleon at Austerlitz, Pershing at St.-Mihiel, Nimitz at Midway and Patton at the Bulge with a final consideration of how the Battle of 9/11 was ultimately lost by the U.S. and what that portends for the future.

©2025 Michael Walsh (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"In A Rage to Conquer Michael Walsh surveys twelve landmark battles from Troy to 9/11. But his interest transcends traditional operational, tactical, strategic, and political approaches to these conflicts. Instead, Walsh brings a lifetime of wide travel and literary, cultural, economic, and social study to chart how these bloodbaths influenced far more than the art of war or the politics of the time, but rather changed civilization and culture itself. A fascinating and engaging 3,000-year walk through military history and the complex interplay between war and the world about it." — Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, author of The End of Everything

"In A Rage to Conquer, Michael Walsh, a brilliant scribe of culture and history, continues the discussion of war that he began with his 2020 book, Last Stands. A Rage to Conquer eschews an operational history of wars, opting instead for a more fruitful interpretative cultural and military approach that views epochal battles in their broader context." — Mackubin Thomas Owens, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute