  Read an excerpt from the book published by W.W. Norton & CO.
Documents and Photos      Wall Street Journal  On April 24, amid
the heavy fighting of the Syrian civil war, Aleppo's thousand-
year-old minaret—a graceful rectilinear tower without parallel
in Islamic architecture—was destroyed. Such cultural
obliteration is far from unusual on the modern battlefield. As
long ago as the Franco-Prussian war, Strasbourg's Museum of Fine
Arts, a building housing important medieval manuscripts and
Roman artifacts, burned down after indiscriminate Prussian
shelling. More recently, the Mostar Bridge, that unique work of
Ottoman engineering that had stood since the time of Suleiman
the Magnificent, was intentionally blown apart by Croatian tank
fire.  It was in World War II, however, that threats to cultural
heritage became a central fact of war. Even before the conflict
began, the Nazis had destroyed hundreds of historic synagogues
with brutal abandon. The Allies, with their reliance on air
power, ended up reducing to r