Winning Westeros: How Game of Thrones Explains Modern Military Conflict

Just like this group's "Strategy Strikes Back," this does not disappoint. What a creative way to explain modern war and warfare. Love it.

Excellent review of Clausewitzian strategy using the GOT universe. After finishing it, I came out one day to see that my puppy had fallen asleep while reading it (obviously due to her being a puppy and not the quality of writing). Millie the dog and I highly recommend!

I am a fan of Game of Thrones and a student of military strategy and tactics. This seemed like the perfect book.It was a clever attempt, but it could have been better. Five stars for creativity and the idea, three stars for execution, and four stars altogether.There is a tremendous amount of material here - 275+ pages and 30 separate chapters, and the authors are an all star cast.Some of the analogies were very good. A few were real standouts. Liam Collins chapter on Machiavelli was superb. Peter Singers bit on strategic leadership was nicely done, and Steve Leonard's chapter on the myth of the accidental strategist is particularly well done.Other parts of the book were either a stretch in terms of the underlying military theory, or, despite heroic attempts, the examples from medieval, magical fantasy did not quite work in terms of real-world, earthly strategy.(I am not going to call out any of these bits.)It is a fun and interesting book, and I did finish it all.I recommend you start with the three chapters I mentioned, and then, make up your own mind about the rest of the chapters.The good news is that this is an ensemble volume, and the chapters do not build. If a particular chapter is not working for you, you can safely move to the next without worrying about missing something vital.All in all, an interesting read.

This is a great book for Game of Thrones fans. I have missed watching Game of Thrones and have enjoyed reliving it through this book. It is interesting to read about all of the similarities to history.I am embarrassed to admit I am not very interested in history unless it has cinematic drama added to it.I received this galley from NetGalley.

As with any book of essays, some are better than others. Here there seem to be more clunkers than gems. There are a couple of reasons, I think.First, the book was written in Season 7, before the series' shocking end. Most writers are pretty cheery about the show's arc and at this late date their cheerfulness falls flat.Second, and this is more problematic, the writers don't all seem to have this book's subtitle firmly in mind when they wrote. Rather than explain today's conflicts in terms of GOT, they explain GOT in terms of today's conflicts.Beyond that, as is often the case when academics attempt explication of science fiction and fantasy, these authors forget that their readers often know far more about the book, movie, or series than the visiting academics. This came up with a book on weapons published in 2016 that I reviewed:https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2Z44362MFZFCQ?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srpI suspect here that the people who have more direct experience with military strategy than I do will say the same thing from the other direction.So my recommendation is not to buy this book. If you are interested, try to find it in a library. Test each chapter and read the ones you like.I received a review copy of "Winning Westeros: How Game of Thrones Explains Modern Military Conflict" edited by Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh, and Jaym Gates from the publisher University of Nebraska Press through NetGalley.com.

For what it is, the book is very informative and well explained, using the Game of Thrones "world" to explain our own. Military is the same all over and goals of overarching and specific campaigns is easily translated. The publisher made the call to have the book available to coincide with the last season, rather than releasing it after the fact. Perhaps a revised or second edition should be considered as much of the illustrative narrative is speculative as to what the eighth and final season would bring, based on what the authors knew at the time. Now that the last season has been revealed, the overly optimistic views about the end of the story arcs for some of the characters, do need to be tempered by the reality of what we were given. Hence the 4, rather than 5 stars, which I will gladly up to 5 if they do go back and tweak it for the now known story line. But really, that's the only flaw in an otherwise fine work that fleshes out various aspects of how our contentions for "iron thrones" in our world are informed by the fictional. And vice versa, as well, given that George R. R. Martin was inspired to create the fictional universe by the War of Roses, among other things, in our own. Recommended, though you may find yourself amused in places with what they thought was going to happen, in the end.

As a huge fan of Game of Thrones, I enjoyed this book. I found it to be a more interesting way of explaining today's conflicts. They didn't wait for the final season of Game of Thrones to come out before releasing this book, so some of the speculative endings for arcs don't quite work, but maybe that's for the best.

I love game of thrones an this book helped me tons to understand how the books We’re written an how the show came to life.