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Throughout history cities have been at the center of warfare, from sieges to street-fighting, from peace-keeping to coups de mains. Sun Tzu admonished his readers of The Art of War that the lowest realization of warfare was to attack a fortified city. Indeed, although strategists have advised against it across the millennia, armies and generals have been forced nonetheless to attack and defend cities, and victory has required that they do it well. In Concrete Hell Louis DiMarco has provided a masterful study of the brutal realities of urban warfare, of what it means to seize and hold a city literally block by block. Such a study could not be more timely. We live in an increasingly urbanizing world, a military unprepared for urban operations is unprepared for tomorrow. Di Marco masterfully studies the successes and failures of past battles in order to provide lessons for today's tacticians.

In 1874, just two years before General George A. Custer's death at Little Big Horn, a collection of his magazine articles was published as "My Life on the Plains." Custer, General in the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry, wrote personal accounts of his encounters with Native Americans during the western Indian warfare of 1867-1869. The collection was a document of its time and an important primary source for anyone interested in U.S. military affairs and U.S./Native American relations. Custer's references to Indians as "bloodthirsty savages" were tempered by his empathetic understanding of their reason for fighting: "If I were an Indian, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains, rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation..."