This is a highly readable, and indeed compelling, narrative history of Elizabeth I's Irish wars, with the bulk of the text concentrating on the Desmond Wars in Munster. The story is one of almost unrelieved horror, and indeed some of the incidental details are quite stomach-churning. The period is a pivotal one, not just in Anglo-Irish relations, but in the larger European context as well, in that during it newly-born religious enmities and emerging feelings of national identity created a sense of denial of the other party's humanity as never before. This is the twentieth-century experience of Bosnia, Kossovo and Afghanistan translated into a sixteenth-century Irish setting - indeed in some ways a prelude to the Thirty Years' War. The scale of devastation, the ruthlessness of the protagonists on both sides, the rapid descent into bestiality and the near impossibility of achieving any final settlement other than by outright massacre and exhaustion of the other side makes absorbing but depressing reading. Nobody comes well out of this history, unless it is the peasantry who, manipulated and expended like pawns by their own chieftains, somehow endured despite all, however diminished in numbers. Even allowing for the standards of the time, eminent Elizabethans such as Sir Walter Raleigh emerge as pathological killers and war criminals and their Gaelic counterparts are no more sympathetic. If this book has a weakness it is that it misses out on the epic of Donal O'Sullivan-Beara's epic retreat and skates over the Great O'Neill's 9-Years war in scarcely more than a chapter, despite this episode being in itself of comparable, perhaps greater magnitude, and potentially more significance in the European context, than the Desmond Wars.