SOURCE: “Fighting Words,” in National Review, December 21, 1998, pp. 60-2.

In the following review, Bunting offers positive assessment of The Victors and Ambrose's focus on the military experiences of individual soldiers.

For whom is serious history written? The American academy has long answered: for other university scholars. On occasion, works of academic scholarship become popular: one can think of any number of such books. But in the eyes of university colleagues, their authors as a consequence soon become suspect—quietly derided, yet envied. Historians vulgarly praised as “good writers” are similarly fretted over. Propulsive narrative, pellucid prose, epigrammatical assertion or conclusion, vivid exemplification: such things virtually guarantee the wary regard of other professional historians.

There is a sub-species of history writing that particularly excites academic contempt. This is the history of men at war: not of ministers of war or defense secretaries, but of military leaders and ordinary soldiers...