My interest in history dates back to my years in elementary school. Back then I was hooked by the Second World War, which seemed omnipresent at the time in terms of the available books, movies, and TV shows. And among the books that often attracted my young eye were the Ballantine series of illustrated histories. Edited by Barrie Pitt, these short books offered concise histories of their subjects supplemented with a generous selection of photos, maps, and line drawings – all of which perfect for the novice reader fresh to the topic.

Evidently these books were a success for the publisher, as Ballantine subsequently expanded them to cover a range of subjects. The orange-banded “Campaign” series and the red-banded “Battle” series were supplemented by ones featuring “War Leaders” (distinguished by a purple band), “Weapons” (which was blue-banded), “Politics in Action” (black-banded), “Human Conflict” (yellow-banded) and even “Full Colour Specials” (royal blue-banded). Yet for all of their variety of coverage the predominant focus of these books was the Second World War and the events surrounding it – namely the Nazis and the Holocaust. In retrospect, it’s probably not surprising that for a while I thought that it was the only event of note in the entire 20th century.

Nevertheless, there were a handful of volumes in the various series which took the battles and the personalities of the First World War as their focus. Among them was Geoffrey Jukes’s account of the Brusilov Offensive. A former civil servant who specialized in the Soviet bloc, Jukes was a prolific contributor to the Ballantine series, producing three Battle volumes covering the Eastern Front during the Second World War before turning his attention to its predecessor.

If Jukes’s bibliography is anything to go by, researching the events of the campaign was not easy. With few works available at that time about the First World War in eastern Europe, Jukes relied heavily on memoirs and general accounts of the period. This likely explains why the campaign itself takes up such a relatively small part of what is already a short work, with the events of the offensive covered in a scant 25 photo-filled pages. Much of the rest of the book is taken up with an extended examination of its context, addressing the prewar Russian Army, the first two years of the war, and even the looming threat of revolution. Though informative and often insightful, given the amount of space devoted to it and the book’s intended focus much of it comes across primarily as padding designed to compensate for the lack of details about its ostensible subject.

As a result, what is intended as an introduction to the pivotal Russian campaign of the First World War becomes instead a potted, Brusilov-lionizing summary of the first two years of the war on the Eastern Front. While undoubtedly useful at the time given the lack of similar studies, the decades since its publication have seen the publication of numerous books that have eclipsed it in value, such as Timothy Dowling's The Brusilov Offensive and David Stone's The Russian Army in the Great War. Readers today are best advised to pass on Jukes’s book in favor of reading those works, many of which were written with the benefit of improved archival access and the increased scholarly attention given to this part of the war as a consequence. ( )