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Last Stands

Why Men Fight When All Is Lost

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About this listen

What are we willing to die for? Michael Walsh restores the dignity of lost concepts like honor, duty, sacrifice, and patriotism for our unheroic age.

What is heroism? What are its moral components - altruism, love, self-sacrifice? Why was it once celebrated, and now often dismissed as anachronistic? In this dramatic account of last stands in history - famous or otherwise - Walsh explores the stakes that led men at very different times and places to face overwhelming odds and certain death for the sake of family, home and country.

In Last Stands, Walsh writes about battles in which a small group faced overwhelming odds, and all too often died to the last man - battles like Thermopylae, the Ronceveaux Pass, the Alamo, the siege of Malta, Little Big Horn, Stalingrad, Rorke’s Drift, and the Warsaw Ghetto - explaining why they were fought, what their ultimate outcome was, and their afterlife in history, myth, and culture.

©2020 Michael Walsh (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing Military Middle Ages
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A wonderful book which discusses the actions and consequences of the battles against today’s societal norms. I really enjoyed the stories that gave a background to the protagonists. Really great stuff.

Brilliant book, really enjoyed this.

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I expected a lot from the title alone and got far more than I could have wished for. Yes a most compelling audiobook, well written and narrated; Last Stands delivers the details of several key historical events involving individual or group efforts to stave off defeat knowing that the outcome will result in death to the defenders. Touching on the Spartan (possibly the most famous last stand beyond Custer's at the Little Big Horn) defence at Thermopylae to Korea in 1950's, this is a revisionist look at histories heroic but necessary human battles against all odds. Each topic is usually conjoined by another similar event at a later time period; but the emphasis is not on purely comparison but the similarity of the futility based upon a situation that despite changes in human development over centuries; the same outcome is inevitable. What is also evident from the book is that it highlights the modern conundrum of how history not only repeats itself; but that the causes, effects, and post event consequences directly or indirectly linked have not changed. Listen and learn about the past to understand the present is perhaps the best way to describe this book.

Compelling and Historically Portentous

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An informative and solid book with the curious omission of Dien Bien Phu . Unless l missed it .

Compelling

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I was hoping to get more info on the psyche of the people involved. However this is not the case.
The subject is made very wide. A lot of personal conclusions and half truths. In one case he states that the nazi persecuted Catholics. totally wrong since he had corporation from the pope in those days. Priest where recruiting people to fight communism.

title is misleading

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the topic is interesting and the idea to go through historical samples is good. Premises were promising.
Unfortunately narration is weak.
- Historically very superficial, not even acceptable at my high school level; it would have been better to eliminate it, since the book is not a history text
- psychological analysis is weak
- no real conclusions

why men fight

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