<human>: Hello, I'm attending summer courses at my university and my first assignment for one of them is to make a book review. The course is named "The history of war", and I would very much like to know more about wars which were of importance to the general state of mind, development of ideas and technology and/or philosophy before and after. Now, I'm not very interested in the Second World War or French revolutionary wars because of my familiarity with them; anything else would be very much of interest to me however.

I'm sort of searching for a book that is not only interesting, but a good read, perhaps centered around a specific battle which encapsulates the war and use it to explain both historical reasons and philosophical undercurrents on both side of the conflict. I have a few tips from my teacher already, but the book reviews show them to be rather dry reading.

Can you give me a shortened version of the text?
<bot>: Have you read a good book about War? Does it touch upon historical reasons to it and its consequences? Was it good? If so, please tell me.