U.S. Conflicts in the 21st Century: Afghanistan War, Iraq War, and the War on Terror. Edited by Spencer C. Tucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016. 3 vols. Acid free $310 (ISBN 978-1-4408-3878-1). E-book available (978-1-4408-3879-8), call for pricing.

Professor Tucker has an especially topical theme this time, and the result is impressive. The prolific editor of military-related reference volumes provides an overview of the tumultuous first fifteen years of the century and helpful grounding in where events may go from here. Given that the series arrives at the end of a dramatic election cycle in which national security is a major concern, this is a product every library with a military or history reference collection should consider buying.

More than six hundred entries tell the roles of events, places, policies and key individuals in shaping US conflicts leading up to and following the September 11 attacks. Many of the entries—“Fatwa,” “Neoconservatism”—are necessarily more sociological or political than military per se, reflecting conflicts that have required Americans to learn more about peoples and ideologies than weapons and battles. Their breadth is a major asset of the set.

So are several helpful features, including twenty-two primary documents, a chronology, a glossary, a bibliography and an index, as well as twelve maps. The first volume includes a preface and an introduction; both are lengthy essays that give a lot of background and opinion about the current era and the one preceding it.

The organization of the books is confusing in spots; the list of documents is provided toward the front of each volume but not at the beginning of the documents section itself. Also, the use of Roman numerals on scores of pages before the entries begin in each volume raises the question in the mind of this ancient reviewer of whether most young adults even know how to read an xliii these days. One more unfortunate thing—perhaps the result of a rush to publication in this hot political year—is some unpolished writing. An example, from the entry about controversial filmmaker Michael Moore: “Moore’s documentary style . . . often reveals as much about Moore and his opinions than the subject of his film” (583).

Nonetheless, given Tucker’s status as a respected military historian, if it can be assumed the facts were more carefully edited than the prose, he seems to have a uniquely valuable piece of work here. There’s been a boatload of books about twenty-first century American warfare written in the past two decades, but most are advocacy projects for this or that way the US military should be prepared to fight. Tucker focuses instead on the actual history.

An exception is Anna Sabasteanski’s Patterns of Global Terrorism 1985–2005: U.S. Department of State Reports with Supplementary Documents and Statistics (Berkshire 2005). Her scope is much more global than that of the newer work and is primarily a scholarly collection of documents, as opposed to Tucker’s effort to inform general readers, but with terrorism itself being the declared enemy in current US conflicts, there is a lot of overlapping subject matter.

Tucker’s timeliness does risk being outdated by rapidly evolving circumstances, and he may have acknowledged as much with several maps about the two Gulf Wars and none about the war against ISIS. Still, a reference work so comprehensive it even has an entry about recently embattled Turkish President Recep Erdoğan will be of value to library users for years to come.—Evan Davis, Librarian, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana