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In Battlegrounds, Michael Stephenson assembles an impressive roster of the world’s best military historians and writers, including Dr. David Chandler, Richard Holmes, John Warry, and Brendan Morrissey, to discuss the impact of geography on military strategy and history. This collection of essays, illustrated with vintage and modern maps, offers geographic adventure around the world, across centuries, and through every kind of terrain, shedding new light on famous battles and introducing less well-known—but nevertheless significant—moments in military history.

　　Throughout military history, battles have often been determined by certain “geographic imperatives”—characteristics of the terrain that significantly affect the nature of the fighting. Confrontations, therefore, have essentially been decided by an army1/4s ability to adapt to geographical features, giving rivers, mountains, and beaches lead roles in the political shaping of the world.

　　From Alexander the Great’s attack across the Granicus in 334 B.C. to the U.S. siege of the mountains of Afghanistan in 2001, geography has been a permanent and crucial factor in battle. Battlegrounds provides an unprecedented and fascinating look at this most formidable of adversaries throughout the history of warfare.

　　Thirteen sections, each featuring a type of terrain or geographical feature, assess geography's role in determining military strategy and tactics. Extensively illustrated with maps and photos, each chapter contains two to four short summaries of battles or campaigns penned by distinguished military historians: Joseph Alexander, Gary Gallagher, Eric Bergerud and Bryan Perrett are all represented. The articles discuss the military difficulties presented by local geographies: movement is slow and visibility poor in forests, such as the Southeast Asia's Ia Drang Valley or the Teutoberger Wald of Germany circa 9 A.D. The classification of features and problems lends itself to difficulties, however: Yorktown and Bataan illustrate being trapped on a peninsula, but so does Gallipoli, which is for some reason in the "Coasts" section along with Marathon and Tarawa. Add to this the fact that contemporary and historical maps are merrily mixed, which can be misleading in terms of accuracy. On the whole, the book is a trifle superficial for the serious military student, but that level of background knowledge is needed to get full value from some of the articles and most of the maps.