While modern science ponders whether human beings are programmed toward belligerence and warfare, there is no doubt that war has been humanityâ€™s constant companion since the dawn of civilization and that we have become all too proficient in its conduct. In War, noted military historian and award-winning journalist Gwynne Dyer ranges from the tumbling walls of Jericho to the modern advent of total war. He shows how the martial instinct has evolved over the human generations and among our close primate relations. Dyer confronts the reality of war, and the threat of nuclear weapons, but does not despair that war is our eternal legacy. He likes and respects soldiers, even while he knows their job is to kill; he understands the physics and the psychology of battles, but is no war junkie. Dyer surveys the fiery battlefields of human history, never losing sight of the people caught up in war. He actually believes there is hope that war, like slavery, can be abolished. This brilliant book explores the human past to imagine a different future.Abundantly illustrated, with sources from Egyptian pyramid paintings to searing photos from today's news magazines, War is a telling account of mankindâ€™s most destructive tradition.

History

DYER, GWYNNE

Military

Richard D.Irwin

Climate Wars

Random House Canada

Gwynne Dyer is cheering up. Sure, the past decade has had more than its share of stupid wars, obsessions about terrorism, denial about climate change, rapacious turbo-capitalism, and lies, lies, lies. But signs of progress actually do abound. While the world is far from perfect as we embark on a fresh decade, Dyer believes that the "sense of sliding out of control towards ten different kinds of disaster has gone." When things go wrong it’s always easy to pin blame — but singling out the forces that lead to positive change can be trickier. In this illuminating collection of columns from the last five years, Gwynne Dyer ferrets out the signs of hope — without overlooking the issues that remain seemingly intractable. Mining the events of recent history, Dyer contextualizes the recent past and anticipates what the future might have in store. This journalist’s beat is global: from Africa to South America, from Europe to the Middle East, and any other region with a political pulse. Acerbic and iconoclastic, Dyer has never been afraid to call ’em like he sees ’em — and we are all the better for his trademark candour and the breadth of his knowledge and expertise. For anyone seeking to understand the larger forces that shape our society and our world, Crawling from the Wreckage makes for necessary reading.

Crawling from the Wreckage

Gwynne Dyer is cheering up. Sure, the past decade has had more than its share of stupid wars, obsessions about terrorism, denial about climate change, rapacious turbo-capitalism, and lies, lies, lies. But signs of progress actually do abound. While the world is far from perfect as we embark on a fresh decade, Dyer believes that the "sense of sliding out of control towards ten different kinds of disaster has gone." When things go wrong it’s always easy to pin blame—but singling out the forces that lead to positive change can be trickier. In this illuminating collection of columns from the last five years, Gwynne Dyer ferrets out the signs of hope—without overlooking the issues that remain seemingly intractable. Mining the events of recent history, Dyer contextualizes the recent past and anticipates what the future might have in store. This journalist’s beat is global: from Africa to South America, from Europe to the Middle East, and any other region with a political pulse. Acerbic and iconoclastic, Dyer has never been afraid to call ’em like he sees ’em—and we are all the better for his trademark candour and the breadth of his knowledge and expertise. For anyone seeking to understand the larger forces that shape our society and our world, Crawling from the Wreckage makes for necessary reading.

Vintage Canada

Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 is a serious contemplation of what it means to engage in major world conflicts, and the price we pay when we do. The First World War was Canada's baptism of fire, or at least the only one that people now remember. (Montrealers in 1776 or Torontonians in 1814 would have taken a different view.) From 1914 to 1918, after a century of peace, Canadians were plunged back into the old world of great power rivalries and great wars. So was everybody else, but Canadians were volunteers. We didn't have to fight, but we chose to, out of loyalty to ideas and institutions that today many of us no longer believe in. And we have been doing the same thing ever since, although we haven't quite given up on the latest set of ideas and institutions yet. In Canada in the Great Power Game, Gwynne Dyer moves back and forth between the seminal event, the First World War, and all the later conflicts that Canada chose to fight in. He draws parallels between these conflicts, with the same idealism among the young soldiers, and the same deeply conflicted emotions among the survivors, surfacing time and again in every war right down to Afghanistan. And in each case, the same arguments pro and con arise--mostly from people who are a long, safe way from the killing grounds--for every one of those "wars of choice." Echoing throughout the book are the voices of the people who lived through the wars: the veterans, the politicians, the historians, the eyewitnesses. And Dyer takes a number of so-called excursions from his historical account, in which he revisits the events and puts them in context, pausing to ask such questions as "What if we hadn't fought Hitler?" and "Is war written in our genes?" This entertaining and provocative book casts an unsparing eye over what happens when Canada and the great powers get in the war business, illuminating much about how we see ourselves on the world stage.

Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

Americas

Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 is a serious contemplation of what it means to engage in major world conflicts, and the price we pay when we do. The First World War was Canada's baptism of fire, or at least the only one that people now remember. (Montrealers in 1776 or Torontonians in 1814 would have taken a different view.) From 1914 to 1918, after a century of peace, Canadians were plunged back into the old world of great power rivalries and great wars. So was everybody else, but Canadians were volunteers. We didn't have to fight, but we chose to, out of loyalty to ideas and institutions that today many of us no longer believe in. And we have been doing the same thing ever since, although we haven't quite given up on the latest set of ideas and institutions yet. In Canada in the Great Power Game, Gwynne Dyer moves back and forth between the seminal event, the First World War, and all the later conflicts that Canada chose to fight in. He draws parallels between these conflicts, with the same idealism among the young soldiers, and the same deeply conflicted emotions among the survivors, surfacing time and again in every war right down to Afghanistan. And in each case, the same arguments pro and con arise--mostly from people who are a long, safe way from the killing grounds--for every one of those "wars of choice." Echoing throughout the book are the voices of the people who lived through the wars: the veterans, the politicians, the historians, the eyewitnesses. And Dyer takes a number of so-called excursions from his historical account, in which he revisits the events and puts them in context, pausing to ask such questions as "What if we hadn't fought Hitler?" and "Is war written in our genes?" This entertaining and provocative book casts an unsparing eye over what happens when Canada and the great powers get in the war business, illuminating much about how we see ourselves on the world stage.

Canada in the Great Power Game: 1914-2014

“The Iraqi state that was formed in the aftermath of the First World War has come to an end. Its successor state is struggling to be born in an environment of crises and chaos.”
---Ali Allawi, Iraq’s former Minister of Defense
Allawi is not exaggerating. The disastrous American invasion of Iraq that has led to the destruction of the Iraqi state and the subsequent defeat of U.S. military power has finally destabilized the entire Middle East---a region that has been tightly controlled by European and American powers and that has changed little, politically, in forty years. But, in losing the war in Iraq, the United States has lost the will to maintain the status quo in the Middle East, and the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq will go on to shape the future of the region in a way that no one can predict. 
As Gwynne Dyer argues in After Iraq, the Middle East is about to change fundamentally, and everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even national borders themselves are liable to change without notice. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, a Muslim cold war between Sunnis and Shias, almost anything you care to imagine.
Written with clarity, intelligence, and Dyer’s trademark dark humor, After Iraq is essential reading for anyone wanting an informed historical perspective on the future of one of the most important and volatile regions in the world.

After Iraq: Anarchy and Renewal in the Middle East

Middle East

Thomas Dunne Books

A new and revised edition of Dyer’s classic book, widely regarded as one of the most compelling analyses of the history of armed conflict. “War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.” With this provocative statement, Gwynne Dyer launches his brilliant discussion of the history and nature of war. He traces the growth of organized warfare through history, showing conclusively that the basic tenet has remained unchanged — war is an act of mass violence applied against an enemy so that he will do what you want him to do. The only real change has been technological, permitting us to make war on a mass scale. At the height of the Cold War, just such a global conflagration seemed almost inevitable. But the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the ensuing political changes have forced a re-examination of the accepted fundamentals of history. Will open access to the channels of mass communication create enough shared values that we can move beyond mass warfare? Is the threat of terrorism a red herring designed to preserve the military status quo? Are our traditional military and administrative hierarchical structures still relevant? Now, more than ever in our post–September 11 world, we need Gwynne Dyer’s expertise to understand the greatest and most human drama — the act of war. Excerpt from War The Siamese twins, army and state, have never been separated since they were born some eight or nine thousand years ago — and most of the time the state is the stronger of the twins. Armies exist to serve the interests of the state that owns them and their legitimacy comes solely from the fact that they belong to states; similar groups of armed men, if self-employed, are generally known as rebels or bandits. This is the context in which warfare, as opposed to casual and illegitimate violence, must be seen: it is something states do, and have always done, because they believe it serves their interest.

War: The New Edition

It took a quarter-century of bad strategy, including more than a dozen years of Western air attacks and invasions in the Middle East, to bring the so-called "Islamic State" into existence. Can we somehow manage to avoid the well-trodden path of overreacting to the provocations of Islamist extremists? With the rise of ISIS, a new style of terrorism that publicly gloats over acts of extreme cruelty has reawakened the fears of the global audience. But in Don't Panic, Gwynne Dyer argues that the advent of "Islamic State" and its clones does not substantially raise the risk of major terrorist attacks in Western countries. It does, however, pose a grave threat to the Arab countries of the Middle East. In Don't Panic, Dyer first explains why the Middle East has become the global capital of terrorism. He then examines how terrorist organisations in the Arab world have evolved over time, with particular emphasis on the events of the past fifteen years and the current situation in Syria and Iraq. And in the end Dyer departs from his long-standing position that foreign interventions always make matters worse to argue that a little military intervention of the right kind may avert a genocide in Syria. "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions," said John Maynard Keynes. "What do you do, sir?"

Don't Panic: ISIS, Terror and Today's Middle East

While modern science ponders whether human beings are programmed toward belligerence and warfare, there is no doubt that war has been humanity’s constant companion since the dawn of civilization and that we have become all too proficient in its conduct. In War, noted military historian and award-winning journalist Gwynne Dyer ranges from the tumbling walls of Jericho to the modern advent of total war. He shows how the martial instinct has evolved over the human generations and among our close primate relations. Dyer confronts the reality of war, and the threat of nuclear weapons, but does not despair that war is our eternal legacy. He likes and respects soldiers, even while he knows their job is to kill; he understands the physics and the psychology of battles, but is no war junkie. Dyer surveys the fiery battlefields of human history, never losing sight of the people caught up in war. He actually believes there is hope that war, like slavery, can be abolished. This brilliant book explores the human past to imagine a different future. Abundantly illustrated, with sources from Egyptian pyramid paintings to searing photos from today's news magazines, War is a telling account of mankind’s most destructive tradition.

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

RH Canada UK Dist

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DYER, GWYNNE. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by DYER, GWYNNE

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DYER, GWYNNE. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

War

Climate Wars

Crawling from the Wreckage

Crawling from the Wreckage

Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

Canada in the Great Power Game: 1914-2014

After Iraq: Anarchy and Renewal in the Middle East

War: The New Edition

Don't Panic: ISIS, Terror and Today's Middle East

WAR