Code of the Warrior

by Shannon E. French

I found The Code of the Warrior to be a good background summary of some of the origins of the warrior ideals that have been accepted and followed by true warriors over the centuries. Ms. French does a good job at summarizing several warrior cultures, giving history and vital background information which help the reader understand the origins of the different warrior characteristics. This is not a “Pollyanna” look at the traits of the warrior. This book does not simply glorify specific warrior cultures as so many others do. Instead, Ms French delves into both the positives and negatives of each of the eight different cultures that she chose to include in her book. This is done in a very straight-forward and balanced way, as you would expect from an educator.

Personally, I found this book very well written and extremely interesting. The author recommends, and I concur, that the person who has a goal of living life as a true warrior, take what is good from each of these warrior “codes” and leave what is no longer useful for the warrior of today. All of the warrior cultures from the past had both good traits and some which are less than useful for the modern warrior. This book presents both so that you can determine what to accept as part of your personal code and what you would probably be better off leaving to the cultures in question. Besides the discussions of individual warrior cultures, the author also provides the reader with a good bit of history about each of these cultures, which I also found very interesting.

The one area that I wished that the author would have included was an overall summary/combination of the traits from each of these cultures that should make up the code of the warrior for the true warrior of today. It would have been nice if she had taken the best of each of these societies and combined them into a simple summary of traits that should be part of the code of the warrior today, but instead she leaves that up to the reader to decide. This is probably best because, in the end, the code of the true warrior is something that he or she needs to decide on and be dedicated to from a deeply personal dedication. The bottom line is that I highly recommend this book. I really enjoyed it and found it both thought provoking and entertaining. 5 Stars!

Bohdi Sanders
The Wisdom Warrior