Frederick the Great and the Seven Years' War

Frederick the Great entered the Seven Years' War as a monarch with everything to lose. Surrounded by enemies on all sides, outnumbered and outmatched, he faced an alliance of Austria, France, Russia, and Sweden determined to carve Prussia from the map. This is the story of how one man stared down annihilation and changed the balance of European power forever. Ferdinand Schrader's authoritative account traces Frederick's desperate military campaigns, his brilliant use of terrain and deception, and the toll that years of continuous warfare took on his kingdom and his psyche. The book examines the eighteenth-century world in which absolute monarchs waged wars of survival, where military reputation was everything, and where strategic genius emerged from the pressure of existential stakes. For anyone fascinated by military history, political strategy, or the psychology of leadership under impossible odds, this remains a compelling window into one of history's most remarkable periods of survival against all probability.