Hannibal and Me by Andreas Kluth

a book review by @wordsbynate

Andreas Kluth’s Hannibal and Me details the life of Hannibal, a Carthaginian General who mobilised against Rome and occupied Italy for over a decade in the third century BC. Hannibal is regarded as one of the greatest military commanders in history and is well known for crossing the Alps into Italy with a force of 100,000 men and a herd of war elephants.

Andreas’ interest in Hannibal is deeply personal and the book is not merely a historical account of Hannibal’s military achievements. Andreas writes about Hannibal because he sees his own personal story mirrored in that of the General. Andreas reveals that he spent most of his twenties working in a corporate setting that demanded long hours, repetitive tasks and compromised his mental health and overall quality of life. At the time, Andreas was unhappy but he still regarded his job and the stages leading up to it as ‘successes.’ Ultimately, Andreas had engaged in lots of small successes that resulted in one large failure: his unhappy life.

Similarly, Hannibal was the most successful battlefield General in history but ultimately failed to achieve his larger goal of conquering Rome. Hannibal’s skill as a battlefield commander and leader of men saw him win every battle he fought against the Romans but these short term successes distracted him from implementing the right strategy to achieve his overarching goal.

Andreas utilises his personal story and the story of Hannibal to highlight a correlation between small successes and strategic failures. For the contemporary reader, this highlights the possibility that although we may be having small successes (earning money, taking holidays, earning promotions) we may not be working towards the type of big picture strategic success that we really want (work/life balance, extended travel, autonomy in our professions, better relationships).

Having established the misleading nature of his successes, Andreas goes on to detail how history makers such as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Jobs, Ernest Shackleton, Paul Cézanne and others experienced success and failure. There emerges an overarching trend in all of these biographies; that early, explosive successes can be misleading.

What Andreas is trying to show us here is that success and failure are not absolute, humans regularly turn success into failure and failure into success. More importantly, Andreas wants to show us that there is an important distinction between tactical success and strategic success. The big takeaway here is that an individual needs to be conscious of what type of successes he is experiencing so as to avoid clinging to insignificant successes or becoming overwhelmed by failures.

“… meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same…”

If, Rudyard Kipling