The Art of War cover art

The Art of War

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Art of War

By: Sun Tzu, Thomas Cleary, Thomas Cleary - translator
Narrated by: Lloyd James
Try Premium Plus free

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $9.99

Buy Now for $9.99

About this listen

 For more than 2,000 years, Sun Tzu's The Art of War has provided leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception. An elemental part of Chinese culture, it has also become a touchstone for the Western struggle for survival and success, whether in battle, in business or in relationships. Now, in this crisp, accessible new translation, John Minford brings this seminal work to life for today's readers. A lively, learned introduction, chronologies and suggested further reading are among the valuable apparatus included in this authoritative volume. Even those readers familiar with The Art of War will experience it anew, finding it more fascinating - and more chilling - than ever.

Little is known about Sun Tzu (544-496 B.C.) and his life during the Warring States period after the decline of the Zhou dysnasty, but his classic, The Art of War, has been one of the central works of Chinese literature for 2500 years.

John Minford studied Chinese at Oxford and at the Australian National University and has taught in China, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. He edited (with Geremie Barme) Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience and (with Joseph S. M. Lau) Chinese Classical Literature: An Anthology of Translations. He has translated numerous works from the Chinese, including the last two volumes of the Penguin Classics edition of Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone and the martial-arts fiction of the contemporary Hong Kong novelist Louis Cha. Career Success Classics Eastern Military Military Science Philosophy War China Career

Critic Reviews

“Like Thucydides, [Sun Tzu] has a reputation today at least as great as it was well over two millennia ago . . . Given the peculiarly personal acumen and insight that inform Sun Tzu’s brief, sometimes enigmatic, but always practical Art of War . . . we are surely reading the words of an acutely intelligent military man with a subtle, original mind and a wealth of experience all his own.”
—from the Introduction by Peter Harris
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.