The Lost History of 1914: How the Great War Was Not Inevitable - Softcover

Beatty, Jack

3.65

237 ratings by Goodreads

9781632862020: The Lost History of 1914: How the Great War Was Not Inevitable

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632862026 ISBN 13: 9781632862020

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2015

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Now in paperback, a brilliant history of the year it began―"a year forever memorable," in Woodrow Wilson's words―that examines the war and its causes through new eyes.

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About the Author:

Jack Beatty is On Point's news analyst and a longtime senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly. He joined The Atlantic in September of 1983, having previously worked as a book reviewer at Newsweek and as the literary editor of The New Republic. Beatty is the author of "The Rascal King" (1992), a biography of the legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curly that was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; "The World According to Peter Drucker" (1998), an intellectual biography of the social thinker and management theorist; and "Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900" (2007), a thematic history of the Gilded Age. In addition, he is the editor of "Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America" (2001), an anthology of readings on the history of the American corporation named by Business Week as one of the Ten Best Business Books of the year. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, an Olive Branch Award from New York University, a William Allen White Award for criticism from the University of Kansas, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Born and raised in Boston, Beatty now lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Review:

"[A] rich, textural context that allows us to see the war, and indeed all of 1914, fresh . . . Beatty's book is an important contribution to our comprehension of a world bathed in misfortune and headed toward the senseless slaughter of nearly 20 million people. [His] achievement . . . is in taking apart what is known about 1914 and assembling it in different form. We see, of course, what might have been--but, more important, we see, in different light, what was. It was a calamity." ―Boston Globe

"Thought-provoking." ―New Yorker

"The Lost History of 1914 brings alive much of the official world of a century ago." ―Seattle Times

"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." ―The Associated Press

"A comprehensive and insightful examination . . . a rich chronicle of a lost time whose events have been blurred by the passing of decades. [The Lost History of 1914] provides a thoughtful perspective on a period that long ago slipped out of our national conscious and vanished in the foggy mists of time." ―The Nashua Telegraph

"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." ―Open Letters Monthly

"With admirable scholarship, riveting footnotes and acerbically unsparing prose, Beatty weaves together these primary strands: socialist struggles for peace, revolutionary fury at an imperialist war (Lenin, Trotsky, etc.), the war's barbarism, the genesis of Nazism and the extermination of European Jews, and the criminal indifference of the belligerents' governing elites." ―In These Times

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