Monday, July 19, 2010

The War To End All Wars: WWI by Russell Freedman

Clarion Books
August 2010
176 pgs.

Summary
The tangled relationships and alliances of many nations, the introduction of modern weaponry, and top-level military decisions that resulted in thousands upon thousands of casualties all contributed to the "great war," which people hoped and believed would be the only conflict of its kind. In this clear and authoritative account, the author shows the ways in which the seeds of a second world war were sown in the first. Numerous archival photographs give the often disturbing subject matter a moving visual counterpart

1 comment:

  1. Dispassionate descriptions of battle strategies and casualty figures are smoothly intermixed with first-person observations and reactions from soldiers, generals and politicians to make a haunting portrait of a world both utterly different from and yet closely linked to our own. For the first time in my life I felt I began to understand the horrors of trench warfare and poison gas. At several points the numbers of dead from a single campaign, even a single day, were so shocking I had to stop and read them aloud to someone else in incredulity. And since the last chapter so clearly depicted how WWI laid the foundation for WWII, it made me wonder why the ending of WWII did not have the same effect; it makes me want to explore even more. I think this book will haunt me a long time…

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