"The Battle for the Falklands"

The Battle for the Falklands (Max Hastings & Simon Jenkins)

A chunky little hardcover about the brief dust-up between Argentina and the UK in 1982. I liked this book quite a bit, but I should mention that the first 100 pages or so are a bit of a slog; the authors set out to give the conflict context by going into the longstanding political wrangling that lead to the attack in the first place, and while I applaud the depth to which they cover this, they also assume far more intimacy with the politics of the late 70's/early 80's UK than I possess (which is basically none, to be fair). I freely confess I was totally lost for most of these pages, and I was a little bit relieved when the shooting started and it became much easier to keep everything straight. The other minor caveat is that since Hastings was embedded with the British forces, the book's point of view has much more detail about the English side, but this is hardly surprising since military juntas of the kind Argentina had at the time usually don't release the kind of information that would be necessary to make this a more balanced look. (The authors do quote a few Argentine soldiers - as many as they could find for interviews, I suspect.) Minor quibbles aside, this is as far as I can see the definitive history of the conflict - just feel free to flip a few pages towards the beginning.

Grade: B+