At War with War: 5,000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks; An Illustrated Timeline

Legendary designer Chwast takes a break from graphic adaptations of classics (The Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy) for this a sweeping chronology of the history of war. This volume’s antiwar message gets lost as its content amounts to a crib sheet of historical events and their dates of occurrence, with no explanation of the cited conflicts. Bolstered by an occasional historical essay or bits of commentary from the likes of Sun Tsu, Desiderius Erasmus, and Randolph Bourne, this effort renders a juggernaut of a subject into a bare-bones list, accented by Chwast’s starkly expressionist illustrations of soldiers and scenes of war. As a numbing statement on humanity’s obsession with conflict, the book succeeds, but it’s not for history buffs. (Sept.)