John Muller (1) (1699–1784)

I was very curious, when I started this book, as to how the subject of attacking and defending fortified structures was going to be approached. My being a student of medieval and seige warfare I was not a novice on the subject, but the time period was considerably later to what I am used to. As it turns out, not a whole heck of a lot had changed in that 500 years.
The editors, or should I say the re-printers, faithfully reproduced the book's original format. I had to re-wire my brain a bit in order to smoothly turn those little symbols that look like "f"s into actual "s"s. Example: A fentence in thif book lookf like thif. And keep dictionary.com on hand to handle the occasional 18th century word that does not pop up into 21st lexicon very often. Aside from these issues (and I'm not even sure they are issues, but rather reader conditioning) I admire the effort and apparent success in faithfully recreating the text in it's original form.
The book reads as sort of psuedo-procedure manual and a treatise written by an expert who takes time to correct or reinforce his contemporaries' works on the subject. He provides some examples of this approach or that, and whether or not they are practical or successful. Having poured over many military field manuals during my Army career I could easily follow his narrative and form the picture that he was trying to create in my mind. This I believe to be the instructive author's ultimate goal. Some of advice to the reader though. Take a bit of time and examine the plates in the back of the book of the different styles and components of a fortification before diving into the text. Refer back to them often as this will give you a better understanding of what he is explaining.
Mr. Muller was obviously a leading expert of his day on this particular subject and his book is interesting to say the least. There are some dry and abstract parts (math, too much math for a historian) but overall deserving of 4 stars out of 5.… (meer)