Having the words you write be dispassionate and objective doesn't mean you lack an agenda. Everything written ever picks a small set of facts to consider from an effectively infinite set of facts.

The choice of which facts to include, moreover, represents a fairly strong bias; it says that this set of facts is more interesting or important or whatever than most other sets, and enough so that you should ignore all the other sets for the moment and just look at this set.

Which, in the case of this particular book, presumably, along with the countless choices about which facts to include about each battle, also includes at least a) the choice of which 100 battles, and b) the choice that battles of any kind are important enough to talk about for a whole book.

So even if the author tries to stay away from expressing an agenda on the usual axes, I doubt he successfully avoids having one altogether.

True enough. I suppose the reason this book is so good is because it focuses on 100 distinct events which the author believes completely transformed the course of history --- and explains the reasons why they believe this to be true.

History is full of examples of a small force overwhelming a large force against all odds, and I love reading about the clever tricks and twists of fate that made it possible. The fact that the outcome of each battle completely shifted the course of history is an added source of awesomeness.

Sure, Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 were landmarks. But they would have happened eventually --- whether Russia or America did it first seems little more than a silly contest of the times.

But when you read the above book and realize that "Europe, as we know it today, would be completely and utterly different if, thousands of years ago, this one person had not made the monumentally stupid decision of keeping his army awake all night" .... well, that seems to me what makes history so interesting, no?