Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57055 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Andrew Roberts
`Stunning ... no one else writes history quite like he does'

History Today
`A corker of a book ... brings more clarity to this complex, much-written about subject than some historians manage to do in books three or four times as long'

Spectator
'Bold, provocative and witty ... one of the outstanding historians of our age'

Customer Reviews

World War One
Although he has a reputation for being provocative I find Prof. Stone insightful with a gift for looking at a subject from a different perspective. This book while far from comprehensive gives a brief overview of the war that ended the Edwardian Golden Age. It confirms my suspicions that WWI was an exercise in Prussian adventurism. A pre-emptive war aimed primarily at the Russians, by whom they felt they would be overshadowed by 1920 and in the West to knock out the French as quickly as possible. A situation that would be repeated 25 years later. For Britain, fighting initially followed the tradition the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, etc, where it would subsidise its Continental Allies to fight for it using its trade surplus (1916 is the only year Britain sold more goods abroad than it earned). Russia for example, before being knocked out of the war, received £800 million; multiply that by forty for today's value (ironically, they only finished paying it off in 1985 at the height of the Cold War). Not kind to the personalities involved but pragmatic, he reasserts the view of Haig as a creature of his time and his dogged determination to carry on regardless of the evidence and who was intent on "hammering in a screw and when it resisted, trying to hammer it harder". (The best Scotch general in history in that he killed more Englishmen than any other.) He shows how so many clever people were wrong; Churchill and Haskey over Gallipoli and blockading Germany; Weber over Nationalism.
While for Britain, the first shots of the war were fired in Sydney Harbour on August 4th and were warning shots over the bows of a German trader attempting to flee he devotes equal time to the war in the East, an often-neglected area where the treaty of Brest-Litovsk drew up a map of Eastern Europe that looks remarkably similar to that of today. Facts like that, along with his pared down narrative style make for a absorbing read. If you want proof that reality can be as strange as fiction try the amazing fact that the private secretary of Bethmann-Hollwegg ended up working at the University of Chicago and was on the panel that advised Truman in favour of dropping the A-Bomb. A very good read

A well written, easy to read glimpse into WWI
A flowing, easy read that gives an overview of the operations and battles of the First World War, whilst also explaining the politics and people that were to influence it's outcome, particularly focusing on the generally inept leaders who wasted life and had little concept of how to strategize or lead. Most of the book is dedicated to the ebb and flow of a mostly immobile war, and having read it I still feel that I am not entirely certain as to what caused the war in the first place. The excellent final chaper, 'Aftermath', gives an all too brief glimpse at how the end of WWI brought about the eventual WWII. The book also contains simple maps depicting the fronts, which best display how little progress was made on any front in this attritional war.

Highly readable but flawed
The great merits of this book are that it is eminently readable, short (2 sessions at most) and very thought-provoking. Stone's key trigger event for the outbreak of war (the Italian annexation of Libya in 1912 leading the Balkan states to think that they too could throw off Ottoman rule, which in turn led to a stronger Serbia clashing with Austria-Hungary) had never occurred to me before. And Stone's one 'what if' moment in WW1 is not on the Western or Eastern front but on the Italian front.

But this book has flaws. There remain irritating inaccuracies (eg he refers to the infamous Zimmerman telegram inviting the Mexicans to involve 'the Mikado of Japan' in their anti-US alliance - this is not a term generally used by any reputable academic to describe the Japanese emperor). But the biggest and most jaw-dropping failure of this book is the way it glosses over the murder of over half a million - and possibly as many as a million - Armenians in 1915. Stone has always been an apologist for Turkey, which is of course where he lives part of the time, but to describe the Armenian 'genocide' (I use this word advisedly) as a "few massacres of deportees" (my paraphrase of his position) without giving any degree of the scale of the atrocity is shocking in my view.