by Adam Hochschild (Author)
In this brilliant new work of history, Adam Hochschild follows a group of characters connected by blood ties, close friendships or personal enmities and shows how the war exposed the divisions between them. They include the brother and sister whose views on the war could not have been more diametrically opposed - he a career soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of those young men and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately supported the war and one of whom was equally passionately opposed to it. Through these divided families, Hochschild paints a vivid picture of Britain poised between the optimism of the Victorian era and the era of Auschwitz and the Gulag - a divided country, fractured by the seismic upheaval of the Great War and its aftermath.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 356
Publisher: Pan
Published: 02 Feb 2012
ISBN 10: 0330447440
ISBN 13: 9780330447447
In this deeply moving history of the so-called Great War, those opposing its mindless folly receive equal billing with the politicians, generals, and propagandists obdurately insisting on its perpetuation. Implicit in Adam Hochschild's account is this chilling warning: once governments become captive of wars they purport to control, they turn next on their own people.
--Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War
Adam Hochschild is the rare historian who fuses deep scholarship with novelistic flair. In his hands, World War I becomes a clash not only of empires and armies, but of individuals: king and Kaiser, warriors and pacifists, coal miners and aristocrats. Epic yet human-scaled, this is history for buffs and novices alike, a stirring and provocative exploration of the Great War and the nature of war itself.
--Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange
In prose as compelling as a masterful novel, Hochschild i
This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard. --Christopher Hitchens, New York Times Book Review
Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story, and explores it in provocative ways . . . Exemplary in all respects. --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
In this deeply moving history of the so-called Great War, those opposing its mindless folly receive equal billing with the politicians, generals, and propagandists obdurately insisting on its perpetuation. Implicit in Adam Hochschild's account is this chilling warning: once governments become captive of wars they purport to control, they turn next on their own people.
--Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War
Adam Hochschild is the rare historian who fuses deep scholarship with novelistic flair. In his hands, World War I becomes a clash not only of empires and armies, but of individuals: king and Kaiser, warriors and pacifists, coal miners an
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