Sources: 500 Great Military Leaders

500 Great Military Leaders. Edited by Spencer C. Tucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 2 vols. Acid free $189 (ISBN: 978-1-59884-757-4). Ebook available (978-1-59884-758-1),call for pricing.

If the title were 500 Important/Noteworthy Military Leaders, that would sound awkward, so instead we have “Great,” but listing the important/noteworthy is what Tucker says in his preface he was striving to achieve. That helps explain his selections, many of whom are portrayed as capable men who played significant roles in major wars—perhaps as trainers or planners or theoreticians. Others were outstanding subordinate leaders or “great” within their times and locales.

There just haven’t been five hundred Cyruses or Alexanders or Genghis Khans, who could aspire to glory by combining military brilliance, outstanding resources, and absolute political power. Modern military leaders are now almost always directed by civilians, so their opportunity for personal “greatness” in the classical sense is lost.

The latest project from the prolific Tucker comes off as an uninspired response to the unceasing public demand for lists. A third of the entries are from other ABC-CLIO products, but it’s commendable that this is noted up front.

The format is similar to that of Trevor Dupuy, Curt Johnson and David L. Bongard’s Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography (HarperCollins, 1992) and to Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips’s The MacMillan Dictionary of Military Biography (MacMillan, 1998). All three have alphabetical entries as well as either source notes or suggested further readings. Tucker offers a larger type face, and both he and Axelrod provide a few portrait illustrations. Both the Axelrod and Tucker works have prose more readable than some of the densely composed entries in Dupuy.

In looking over the five hundred in Tucker, the only one I saw who rose to prominence in the period since Dupuy or Axelrod were published is David Petraeus. I did not make a formal comparison, but it does appear there are a lot of leaders who appear in only one or two of the works, so Tucker offers some variety to a library that already owns one of the others.

Public librarians looking for something more visually informative will want to consider R. G. Grant’s Commanders: History’s Greatest Military Leaders (DK, 2010) or Jeremy Black’s Great Military Leaders and Their Campaigns (Thames and Hudson, 2008). Both oversize books include hundreds of color illustrations as well as enough text to satisfy the needs of casual readers.—Evan Davis, Librarian, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana