But also making What If? a splendidly tantalizing read are the specific questions explored, several of which are at the top of the list whenever historians (of any stripe) play the possibilities. Thus, Hanson wonders how the world would have been different had the Persians won at Salamis in 480 B.C. (illustration at left); Fleming describes thirteen very plausible ways the British could have thwarted the American colonies’ desperate revolution; McPherson argues (convincingly) that had Robert E. Lee’s infamous “Lost Order” not been lost before Gettysburg that Lee would have forced the North to sue for a peaceful settlement of the Civil War; and Ambrose looks at how a slight weather change would have made the D-Day landing at Normandy a disaster…followed by his fascinating “counterfactual construction” of how the Allies still would have defeated the Nazis.Of course, in any compilation of this size and variety of writers (19 primary essays and 14 mini-essays), the reader will not find uniform delight, or even approval. For instance, I found the book’s opening essay by the University of Chicago’s William McNeill exploring the “what if” questions of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem flat and, to be honest, actually offensive. But this low point was soon over and I thoroughly enjoyed almost all of the rest. And, if you enjoy history – indeed, even if you enjoy such literary genres as mystery, science fiction, politics or other "speculative adventures," I think you will enjoy What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been as well.
