Historian John Keegan's The Face of Battle, 1995, is a riveting account of what it must have been like for the soldiers who actually fought in a medieval battle. The example he uses is the battle of Agincourt in 1415 between English and French armies, in which the weapons used did not differ much from those used by the armies of Igor and the Kumans. Keegan also discusses the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), one of the greatest novels ever written, is another epic of war on Russian soil, describing how the Russians beat back the French invasion of 1812.

Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine, by Anna Reid (1999), is a journalist's exploration of present-day Ukraine that gives a picture of its tragic past and its hopes for the future...