Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

I was reading the June 2025 American Historical Review tonight and came across Peter Lorge's review of A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science by Huang Pumin, Wei Hong, and Xiong Jianping, translatied by Fan Hao. It's one of the most brutal academic takedowns of a book that I've ever read. I'd like to share with you the first sentence from each paragraph, which manage to convey the sense of the whole thing, with my comments afterward in brackets.

1. "The field of Chinese military history in the West has grown considerably in the last couple of decades but remains extremely small." [So this book should be useful.]
2. "A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science is therefore valuable if only because there isn't much else." [My comment #1 was right, but just barely.]
3. "The term 'military science' is particularly problematic. [Dang! We're not even out of the title and things are already "particularly problematic!"]
4. "More problematically, the authors believe that Chinese military thought — or military science, in their terms — did not change after it was established in the pre-imperial period (before 221 BCE)." [It's never a good sign when any paragraph in a review begins with "more problematically."]
5. "This brings us to a deep-rooted problem in this book's scholarship." [After two paragraphs of problems, we now come to "a deep-rooted problem"? Damn!]
6. "Readers unfamiliar with Chinese history, let along Chinese military history, will find the discussions of history and warfare confusing." [In other words, if you know enough to understand this book, you know too much to learn anything from it.]
7. "The translation itself appears to be generally competent, although the translator is not well-versed in the deeper meanings of either the technical military terms in Chinese or in English." [It looks like he's about to let the translator off the hook, but no.]