The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began - Hardcover

Beatty, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802778119 ISBN 13: 9780802778116

Publisher: Walker Books, 2012

Synopsis

In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. "Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war," Beatty writes. "This one maps the multiple paths that led away from it."

Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them-a possible military coup in Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought détente with Germany-might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's hands, these stories open into epiphanies of national character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors-Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II , Woodrow Wilson, along with forgotten or overlooked characters such as Pancho Villa, Rasputin, and Herbert Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution, and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to head it off. Beatty's powerful rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 which killed more than one million men, restores lost history, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy.

Beatty's deeply insightful book-as elegantly written as it is thought-provoking and probing-lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called "the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century." It also arms readers against narratives of historical inevitability in today's world.

About this title

About the Author:

Jack Beatty great up listening to his father's memories of serving in WWI as a sailor on a ship torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay. He is a news analyst for "On Point," the public affairs program on National Public Radio, and the author of The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, and Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900. He lives in New Hampshire.

Review:

“Thought-provoking, and often mordantly ironic.” ―The New Yorker

“Beatty's achievement isn't so much in discovering new material about World War I as it is in taking apart what is known about 1914 and assembling it in a different form. We see, of course, what might have been--but more important, we see, in a different light, what was. It was a calamity.” ―David Shribman, The Boston Globe

“Beatty seeks to navigate the historiography of the first great conflict of the twentieth century away from the 'metaphysical no-man's land of historical inevitability' and back into the 'trenches of empiricism.'” ―The New Statesman

“Beatty... captures the sweep of the events that gripped the world and illuminates the epic arrogance, the paranoia, the pettiness and the myopic self-serving views of the European heads of state who had laid the cornerstone of a conflict that would lead to the deaths of millions from Moscow to Maine.” ―Paul Collins, Nashua Telegraph

“Beatty has a great eye for the vivid details that reveal character...'Downton Abbey' notwithstanding, the prewar era really does seem like a lost time. Beatty manages to shed some light on that receding era.” ―Michael Hill, The Associated Press

“THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914 brings alive much of the official world of a century ago.” ―Bruce Ramsey, Seattle Times

“Bold stuff...[An] exuberant and bulging rag-bag of counter-factual history that challenges the 'cult of inevitability' that Europe's war-leaders were retrospectively so eager to embrace.” ―David Crane, The Spectator

“[A] startling study of what Woodrow Wilson called 'an injury to civilization.'” ―Eve Ottenberg, In These Times

“Spritely, captivating...[Beatty's book] delivers his signature storyteller's insights. Hardly any writer working today can amass such an enormous array of information and shape it all so effortlessly into paragraph after compelling paragraph. The centennial of World War I is bound to produce a tsunami of verbiage – and, if we're lucky, some genuinely first-rate stuff. THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914...steals a march on all of them. Highly recommended.” ―Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

“THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914 will leave its mark on how we think about World War I and perhaps, beyond that, on how we think about history and history in the making.” ―Harvey Blume, The Arts Fuse

About this edition

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0802778119
• ISBN 13: 9780802778116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400