Warrior women : the Amazons of Dahomey and the nature of war /

It is not often that an author recommends other books to readers who want more information on the topic covered in his own work. Edgerton suggests Stanley B. Alpern's Amazons of Black Sparta (CH, Sep'99) and Edna Bay's Wives of the Leopard (CH, Jan'00) with good reason. Warrior Women is narrative without analysis, written for the most general readers, especially those with a taste for romanticized military history with lots of unsophisticated violence. The Amazons do not even appear until the book is half over. More time is spent retelling Victorian travelers' accounts of the blood soaked "annual customs" of the Dahomey state than explicating the function of notorious female soldiers of the kings. Even Edgerton at last admits that they were never more than a short-lived, small part of the military establishment and society and that they disappeared with French conquest. A light history of 19th-century Dahomey for a limited sector of the reading public. Better history with fewer errors and a lot more attention to "how" and "why" exists elsewhere as Edgerton has suggested. R. T. Brown; formerly, Westfield State College