Review by Choice Review
For over a generation, the study of the war plans of the Great Powers dominated the historiography on the origins of WW I, while human agency seemed to play only a secondary role. McMeekin (Koc Univ., Turkey) bases his narration on a close reading of the extant primary and secondary sources from the major players--Austria, Germany, France, Russia, and Britain--and returns human agency to the events that led to war. The result is a fascinating study of Austrian and German ham-handed diplomacy (bordering on cluelessness) combined with Russian and French duplicity, with a dose of British disengagement added for good measure. The author reorients understanding of the war's origins from an obsession with Germany's infamous Schlieffen Plan to an analysis that also considers the belligerent policies of France and Russia. While he does not exonerate German responsibility for the war, McMeekin details how Russia and France willfully lied to British diplomats about the timing of their mobilizations in order to ensure that Austria-Hungary and Germany were labeled the belligerents. Indeed, of all the continental great powers, Germany mobilized last, yet it was the first to violate Belgian neutrality. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. F. Krome University of Cincinnati--Clermont College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Thousands of miles to go? A World War I history (or two) can be an ideal companion. IN MY HOME STATE, California, we listen to audiobooks mostly while driving. When stuck in freeway traffic, I sometimes wonder whether the guy in my rearview mirror is secretly absorbed in "Harry Potter," or if the smiling woman in the next lane is hearing Mr. Darcy woo Elizabeth Bennet. When it comes to immersing yourself in the First World War by audio, however, you'll need more than a short commute. The war was very long, the books about it tend to be very long, and about this cataclysm that so thoroughly changed our world for the worse, surely you don't want to listen to merely one book? So I suggest you reserve this listening for some road trip of epic length, like that drive you've always wanted to take from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, or from Rotterdam to Vladivostok. Here are some suggestions for the journey: Prelude to Catastrophe Start with one or two of the very good books about how this war began. After all, part of the tragedy is that it didn't have to happen. In the early summer of 1914, Europe was happily at peace. No country openly claimed another's territory. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Czar Nicholas II of Russia had been on yachting holidays together. Ties between Germany and Britain were particularly close: Wilhelm had been at the deathbed of his grandmother Queen Victoria; more than 50,000 Germans were working in London or other British cities; and Germany was Britain's largest trading partner. In late June, British cruisers and battleships visited Germany's annual Elbe Regatta, where the Kaiser donned his uniform as an honorary British admiral. When the Royal Navy warships sailed for home, their commander sent a signal to his German counterpart: FRIENDS IN PAST AND FRIENDS FOREVER. And yet weeks later the Continent was in flames, and the slaughter on such a scale that 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a single day. The veteran journalist and military historian Max Hastings describes the day, Aug. 22, in his vivid "Catastrophe 1914": A great mass of French troops were disoriented in a heavy fog, then suddenly found themselves in the sights of German howitzers on a hilltop as the fog cleared. Gallant French charges, spurred on by drums and bugles, were useless in the face of machine-gun fire, and the cavalrymen's horses only made their riders more conspicuous. "The dead lay stacked like folding chairs," Hastings writes, "overlapping each other where they fell." Similar disaster struck colonial troops from Senegal and North Africa, one regiment led by a French officer who had advocated the use of "these primitives, for whom life counts so little and whose young blood flows so ardently, as if eager to be shed." It is hard to imagine a more engrossing panorama of this momentous year, although the audio rendition by the actor and former BBC news reader Simon Vance is slightly too tense and breathless for my taste. In his introduction, Hastings pays generous tribute to someone who covered much the same ground more than 50 years ago, Barbara Tuchman in "The Guns of August." Documents found since then have made Tuchman's diplomatic history slightly dated, but her portrait of foolhardiness and delusion as Europe slipped into war is unsurpassed. What were the Russians thinking, for example, when Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, who had never commanded men in battle, was appointed commander in chief? Considered in the grand duke's favor, however, was his magisterial height of 6 feet 6 inches, with "boots as tall as a horse's belly." The railway cars that housed his headquarters were built for ordinary mortals, and pieces of white paper were pasted over all doors to remind Nikolai to duck. In a later essay about the writing of history, Tuchman named this as her favorite visual detail in the book: "I was so charmed by the white paper fringe that I constructed a whole paragraph describing Russian headquarters at Baranovici in order to slip it in." (The grand duke, incidentally, let it be known that after-dinner conversation among members of the headquarters staff should be on topics not concerned with the war.) Anywhere you look, in these early months of fighting, there was madness in abundance. What were French generals thinking when they sent millions of infantrymen wearing bright red pantaloons, bright blue jackets and bright red caps off to face German snipers? What were the Germans thinking when they outfitted their soldiers with spiked helmets made not of metal but of leather? At a mere 15 CDs, the audio version of Tuchman makes a smaller pile than the 20 discs for Hastings. But it will still get you 19 hours and quite a few hundred miles along that drive. The narrator, Wanda McCaddon - who re- cords under the name Nadia May - is spirited but not melodramatic. Still, as a longtime admirer of Hichman, who was a native New Yorker, I confess that I wanted her reader to have an American accent rather than McCaddon's British one, elegant though it is. Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace," with a sonorous but rather slow 32-hour narration by Richard Burnip, covers a longer time period than do Hastings and Tuchman, the entire decade and a half before the conflict began. MacMillan is an old-fashioned historian in the way she puts great stress on personal responsibility - but this is an appropriate perspective, I think, for a time when Europe's three remaining emperors wielded such enormous power. "Any explanation of how the Great War came must balance the great currents of the past with the human beings who bobbed along in them but who sometimes changed the direction of the flow." MacMillan's thumbnail portraits of some of those bobbing in the currents are a delight, and she happens to be the great-granddaughter of one of them, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. WHOSE FAULT WAS THE WAR? There is enough blame for all to share: When leaders confidently ordered their armies to mobilize, neither side foresaw just how catastrophic the carnage would be. After it was over, the victorious Allies of course blamed Germany, exacting big reparations in the Versailles peace settlement. Then from the 1930s onward, revulsion at the war's vast toll led both historians and popular culture to pin responsibility on the Allies as well. Archival finds by the German scholar Fritz Fischer in the 1960s, however, led him to fault German expansionism. In recent years, the pendulum has swung in some new directions. David Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer" focuses on Austria-Hungary's role (its artillery and Danube gunboats did, after all, fire the war's first shots); Christopher Clark's widely praised "The Sleepwalkers" puts considerable onus on Serbia as a rogue state with irredentist dreams; and Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War" provocatively blames Britain for entering the conflict, even though it had not been attacked, and thereby turning a Continental war into a worldwide one. (Audio is not a good way to take in Ferguson's book, however, because of its many charts and graphs.) Now Sean McMeekin's "July 1914" points a finger at Russia and its waffling czar, its ambition to control the Bosporus, and its generals who wanted to avenge their humiliating defeat by Japan in 1905. Concentrating on the period before the actual fighting, McMeekin lacks some of the color - and horror - of Hastings and Hichman. The audio narration by Steve Coulter is matter-of-fact and bereft of theatrics, but perhaps that is suitable for a book primarily about diplomatic maneuvering. Armageddon in Full By now, at the midpoint of your drive - Panama? The Urals? - it's time to move beyond 1914 and into the nearly four years of fighting that followed. John Keegan's authoritative "The First World War" is a solid, balanced and reliable account by a man who spent his life writing military history (Keegan died in 2012) and teaching it to officer cadets at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point. The book is enriched by his deep knowledge of wars past. For example, he compares the "novelty" of telephone lines allowing a World War I general to have his headquarters behind the front to Wellington's having to ride in sight of the enemy at Waterloo in order to know what was going on, as well as to the way technology in the Persian Gulf war of 1991 (which Keegan covered for The Daily Telegraph) allowed commanders to orchestrate land, sea and airstrikes from a great distance. Simon Prebble gives "The First World War" a brisk, fast-paced reading. However, the Keegan book I would recommend you listen to first is "The Face of Battle," his study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. These three crucial battles in British history were centuries apart but took place remarkably close to one another, in what today is northern France and Belgium. His evocation of the Somme, in 1916 - a vast bloodletting that was a victory for neither side - is particularly powerful. Surprisingly for someone on the political right who was a hawk about wars in his own time, Keegan is extremely sensitive to class privileges, pointing out that even today we know more about how some British regiments fared at the Somme than others, because those with less wealthy officers could not afford to commission detailed regimental histories. Compared with some of these behemoths, Norman Stone's compact, almost aphoristic "World War One: A Short History" is as a skiff to a battleship; you can almost listen to its some 150 pages of text - Prebble reading again - on a drive to pick up the groceries. But do you really want such a short account of such a long war? A more interesting book of Stone's is "The Eastern Front 1914-1917." No aspect of the war is more haunting than the meeting on these battlefields between the two regimes with double-headed eagles on their coats of arms, Imperial Russia and Austria-Hungary. Russian officers were promoted largely by seniority and connections at court; in Austria-Hungary, three-quarters of the officers were German speakers, but only one in four of the enlisted men, from a bewildering array of ethnic groups, even understood the language. Russia's illiterate peasant soldiers frequently chopped down roadside telegraph poles for cooking fuel. Exasperated signalers then had to send orders by radio, but had few code books, and so broadcast "in the clear" - to the delight of their enemies. Men died by the millions, and in the Carpathian Mountains, wolves gnawed on the bodies of the wounded. This clash of rickety empires epitomizes the senselessness of the war that left behind what Winston Churchill called a "crippled, broken world." That folly should underline a lesson we have painfully learned anew in recent years: Wars are seldom won as quickly as everyone expects, and almost always create far more problems than they solve. CATASTROPHE 1914 Europe Goes to War By Max Hastings Read by Simon Vance Blackstone Audio THE GUNS OF AUGUST By Barbara W. Tuchman Read by Nadia May Blackstone Audio THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE The Road to 1914 By Margaret MacMillan Read by Richard Burnip Random House Audio THE PITY OF WAR Explaining World War I By Niall Ferguson Read by Graeme Malcolm Audible Studios JULY 1914 Countdown to War By Sean McMeekin Read by Steve Coulter Audible Studios THE FIRST WORLD WAR By John Keegan Read by Simon Prebble Random House Audio THE FACE OF BATTLE By John Keegan Read by Simon Vance Blackstone Audio WORLD WAR ONE A Short History By Norman Stone Read by Simon Prebble Audible Studios ADAM HOCHSCHILD'S most recent book is "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918," available in both print and audio formats.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
McMeekin's sally into the ever-burgeoning genre of WWI origin stories does not refrain, as does historian Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, from apportioning blame for the outbreak of the war. This can be a tricky task for historians, complicated by documentary gaps about the July 1914 crisis, which indicate some of the power players involved destroyed or doctored evidence. Historian David Fromkin (Europe's Last Summer, 2004) seized on this to indict Germany as the primary instigator of WWI. While hardly absolving Germany, McMeekin argues that the principal suspects are the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, and the French president, Raymond Poincare, both of whom also altered evidence during the same period. McMeekin incorporates diplomatic exchanges among the powers, which both acknowledge responsibility and attempt to saddle their opponents with the brunt of it, and grants the Entente powers better success than the Triple Alliance at the high-risk, not to say cynical, operation of assigning blame for starting a continental European war. Alluding to historical controversies, McMeekin ably delivers what readers demand from a WWI-origins history: a taut rendition of the July 1914 crisis.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McMeekin's newest (after The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power) is a superbly researched political history of the weeks between the assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War I. Many historians believe that had Austria acted decisively in that interim, the "War to End All Wars" may have been averted. Instead, the Austrian government vacillated, finally taking decisive action after more than a month of convoluted and awkward diplomatic maneuvering. Relying on extensive research in numerous archives, as well as diaries and correspondence from key national leaders, McMeekin examines the intricacies of Austrian politics and diplomacy to explain the delay, carefully reconstructing the exploits of leading actors-particularly the Austrians and their crucial false assumption that Russia would not mobilize in defense of Serbia. Though the account is full of honest men making difficult decisions under extreme pressure, there are also numerous examples of intentional deceit, even among allies like Austria and Germany, and France and the United Kingdom. McMeekin's work is a fine diplomatic history of the period, a must-read for serious students of WWI, and a fascinating story for anyone interested in modern history. 17 b&w images. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary Agency (U.K.). (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
McMeekin (History/Ko Univ.; The Russian Origins of the First World War, 2011, etc.) treads familiar ground but delivers a thoroughly rewarding account that spares no nation regarding the causes of World War I, although Germany receives more than its share of blame. Historians love to argue about who started World War I. Blaming Germany fell out of fashion soon after the Armistice succeeded, replaced by an interpretation that blamed everyone, exemplified by Barbara Tuchman's classic 1962 Guns of August. Within a decade, German scholars led another reversal back to their own nation's responsibility. Russia, huge and backward but rapidly modernizing, was the key. German military leaders led by Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, believed Russia would attack Germany as soon as it felt confident of victory and that only a preventive war could save the nation. Austrian Archduke Ferdinand's murder by a Serbian terrorist proved a godsend. Austria yearned to crush Serbia, the pugnacious Balkan nation stirring up the Slav minority in Austria-Hungary's rickety empire. Von Moltke decided it was time to set matters right since Austria's cooperation was guaranteed. Russia's refusal to stop mobilizing in support of Serbia allowed him to warn that it was about to attack and that Germany had to strike first. It did so by invading Belgium on August 4, the act that made war inevitable. Tuchman remains irresistible, and David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer (2004) is the best modern history, but McMeekin delivers a gripping, almost day-by-day chronicle of the increasingly frantic maneuvers of European civilian leaders who mostly didn't want war and military leaders who had less objection.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
