How Great Generals Win

By: Bevin Alexander

Narrated by: James Slattery

Throughout history great generals have done what their enemies have least expected. Instead of direct, predictable attack, they have deceived, encircled, outflanked, out-thought, and triumphed over often superior armies commanded by conventional thinkers.

Collected here are the stories of the most successful commanders of all time, among them Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stonewall Jackson, Sherman, Rommel, Mao Zedong, who have demonstrated, at their own points in history, the strategic and tactical genius essential for victory. Ironically this virtue does not come naturally to military organizations, since more often than not the straight-ahead, narrow-thinking soldier will be promoted over his more lateral-minded, devious counterpart. Yet when the latter gets control, the results may be spectacular.

©1993 Bevin Alexander (P)1995 Blackstone Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"This study is essential reading for students of military strategy and tactics." (Publishers Weekly)

Excellent work, excellent reading

Mr. Alexander’s well-researched review of military strategy through the ages was enlightening, with insights galore. This is a work of masterful analysis. Mr. Slattery does justice to this work, with his pleasant and steady intonation, enunciation, pronunciation and accent. It was as much a pleasure to listen to Mr. Slattery’s reading as it was to imbibe Mr. Alexander’s insights.

Excellent Strategic Coverage

This book definitely covers great generals over the course of history and what their strategy was to win their battles.

Doesn’t get into the tactical level of what they moved where but the overall strategy of the general to win the battle. Outstanding read the covers the aspects from a strategy standpoint of these great leaders.

I could listen to this strategic analysis forever.

Fantastic analysis; each chapter is almost perfect length for my attention span. My only wish is that the book had several hundred hour-long episodes of insightful analysis like that in these few chapters. I could listen to strategic analysis of this nature for years ... one chapter at a time.

helpful to have map

without a map it hard to follow events. pretty detailed and a better summary of tactics would be helpful.

The great one .

The book is great and had a great time listening to the narrator thanks .

Greatly Informative and Contextual

As someone who has read about Napoleon, Mao, Gengis Khan, Rome, and WW2, this book was extremely informative. It offered great context on exactly *how* these great battles occurred. Given the length of the book it doesn’t provide step by step detail of every battle and does a good job of keeping the material easy to follow, not bombarding the listener with numbers and figures easy to forget. Found this in the plus catalog and honestly I would’ve purchased it.

If you are a fan of history and looking for some additional details on these conquests I would recommend reading.

Fantastic details of how battles were actually won

Possibly the best summary of large scale strategy/tactics I’ve read. Fix and flank. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Read on!

Some Aspects of the Narration are Unpleasant

So far I've really liked the book, except for one thing none of the other reviews mention. The narrator often pauses, and whatever he is doing (swallowing, licking his lips, whatever he does to prep for the next part...) is very audible and detracts from the Audiobook a lot, for me at least. That is the *only* reason I did not rate this as a 5.

Excellent book, dull reader

This book made me think about war winning strategic principles, which is why I wanted to read it. That said, the reader about put me to sleep even though the material he was reading was enthralling.

Deception! Deception! Deception

This one is obviously for lovers of military history and strategy. I don’t think this was one of the best Great Courses books, but that may be because I’ve enjoyed so many on similar topics that nothing here felt fresh. Obviously, that could be quite different if I had started with this one. Overall, it’s a nice (if short) look at the importance of deception to a commander, but in doing so, other critical elements of success seemed to me to get minimized whether they be supply, discipline, etc.