Rating: 
Summary: Hagiography
Review: This is a solid book, that does a good job presenting an overview of Hannibal's life and campaigns. One strength of the book is Dodge's emphasis on Hannibal's qualities as a captain, in keeping his army together as an effective unit through great difficulties, in a foreign country no less. That aspect of his greatness is often overshadowed by the crushing victories he achieved in battle.On the other hand, the tone of the book is overly fawning, with Hannibal presented as perfect, and any failures of his cause due to factors outside his control. Even worse, Dodge's worship of Hannibal leads him to run down the achievements of his Roman rival, Scipio, giving the book an unbalanced feel to it. I also found Dodge's long digression on the exact route taken by Hannibal through the Alps to be irrelevant and tedious. It may have been a controversy at the time of writing, but exactly which pass Hannibal's army marched over had zero effect on any of the important events before or after the march, and so the detailed discussion of the issue would have been better left out or relegated to an appendix. So, while this is a good book to read to learn the facts about Hannibal, I'd encourage any reader to be sceptical and not to accept Dodge's celebratory interpretations too uncritically.
Rating:
Summary: Average
Review: While Dodge's book is informative it is not completely trustworthy. T.A. Dodge was clearly very enamored by Hannibal and thus ran into trouble because he seemed to have a hard time criticizing Hannibal in any way. When he did so it was insincere, nothing more than window dressing. In fact, on a few occasions he directly contradicts himself, whether purposefully or not I do not know, in order to portray Hannibal in a brighter light. Also, as other reviewers have stated, Dodge apparently had rather poor grammer skills which cause his writing quality to decrease some. The only reason I would rate this book as a 3 star instead of 2 is because, while the book has a relatively high amount of flaws for a history, most are either trivial or easily deciphered and do not affect the good amount of information and quality analysis.
| 
