{"title":"Cathal Nolan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"mercy-book-cathal-nolan-9780190077280","title":"Mercy","description":"War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. It is an arena where individuality is subsumed in collective violence and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy pitted against its reflection in an elemental struggle for survival. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this gripping, poignant, and powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus. Yet somehow the trigger is not always pulled. A different choice is made. Restraint triumphs. Humanity is rediscovered and honored in a flash of recognition. This book gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance - across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary men and women who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Mercy is an exceptional book about exceptions, challenging myths and heroic fabrications, refuting claims to exclusive moral virtue. It reminds us that decency in warfare is also universal, offering a haunting and compellingly humane counternarrative to war's usual inhumane logic.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743735587089,"sku":"NGR9780190077280","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999550574865,"sku":"NIN9780190077280","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52865558577425,"sku":"CIN019007728XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/019007728X.jpg?v=1751323364"},{"product_id":"allure-of-battle-book-cathal-j-nolan-9780190931513","title":"The Allure of Battle","description":"Stretching from Antiquity to the Second World War, a major new work of history that examines how battles have been fought--and reveals how wars have actually been won.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50096276635921,"sku":"CIN0190931515G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50264182423825,"sku":"GOR013903882","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999680139537,"sku":"NIN9780190931513","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52110658863377,"sku":"NGR9780190931513","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52394199941393,"sku":"GOR012854618","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52488821997841,"sku":"NLS9780190931513","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53143081976081,"sku":"CIN0190931515VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190931515.jpg?v=1751070177"},{"product_id":"allure-of-battle-book-cathal-nolan-9780195383782","title":"The Allure of Battle","description":"Cathal Nolan's The Allure of Battle shows that while wars have shaped the history of the modern world, their outcomes are decided by many other factors. The book argues that major battles are not decisive to the outcome of wars; rather, wars depend on longer-term attrition in which the side that wins gradually and remorselessly overwhelms the other with larger arsenals and greater reserves of manpower. To illustrate his argument, Nolan draws on conflicts throughout the world and throughout history (aside from classical or medieval warfare, which, he argues, had greatly different characters from each other and from early modern and modern warfare).   The Allure of Battle systematically examines a series of great battles, each described in the standard literature as the ¨turning point¨ of the war in which they occurred. It asks how they actually fit in the histories of those wars and military history more generally. In each case Nolan will show that even huge and important battles, which are widely considered to have been decisive, actually and mainly contributed to victory or defeat by compressing attrition, which is what in the end led to the outcome of each and every war. He will also illustrate how the character of longer wars of attrition also fundamentally shaped extended periods of postwar peace, that military, moral, and matériel exhaustion rather than battlefield supremacy per se was determinative. Nolan is not proposing to have discovered linear or universal laws about modern military history, nor is he attempting a \"theory of war. \" His point is to look at battles within the context of the wider conflict in which they took place. The result will be an accessible, provocative, and even entertaining book that will reflect fresh thinking in the historical community about the conduct of warfare in terms that will appreciated by a wider readership.  The Allure of Battle is an accessible, provocative, and entertaining book that illuminates fresh debate in the historical community about the conduct of warfare in terms that readers of military history will appreciate.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50315307221265,"sku":"GOR013923228","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50329656590609,"sku":"CIN0195383788VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50823563739409,"sku":"NGR9780195383782","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999847485713,"sku":"NIN9780195383782","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51201190396177,"sku":"CIN0195383788G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51922160320785,"sku":"GOR009132072","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52140298961169,"sku":"NLS9780195383782","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52559471739153,"sku":"GOR011798687","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195383788.jpg?v=1776766041"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-cathal-nolan.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}