From the Back Cover:
“Without question, Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 is the most honest and engaging history ever written about those fateful months after World War I when the maps of Europe were redrawn. Brimming with lucid analysis, elegant character sketches, and geopolitical pathos, Paris 1919 is essential reading—the perfect follow-up to Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial Guns of August.”
—Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center
“Compelling . . . exactly the sort of book I most like: written with pace and flavored with impudence based on solid scholarship; illuminating tangled subjects with irreverent pen portraits of the individuals concerned; and with a brilliant eye for quotations.”
—Roy Jenkins, author of Churchill
“Margaret MacMillan’s compelling portrait of the heroes and rascals of Versailles, with all their complex and contradictory human and political foibles, breathes life into the most urgent issues still before us. This brilliant and dramatic book rekindles hope in the grand defining themes that emerged as World War I ended: economic justice, human rights, and a league to ensure international amity.”
—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt
“It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.”
—Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Fascinating and funny . . . Most of the problems treated in this book are still with us today—indeed, some of the most horrific things that have been taking place in Europe and the Middle East in the past decade stem directly from decisions made in Paris in 1919. It is . . . instructive and sobering to read about the passions, the humbug and the sheer stupidity that gave rise to them.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“MacMillan is brilliant at evoking the atmosphere of the conference. . . . Everyone who was anyone—from Elinor Glyn to Marcel Proust—hung around on the fringes of the conference. MacMillan enlivens her narrative with very funny stories about the regions whose affairs the negotiators sought to settle.”
—Richard Vinen, Financial Times
“Macmillan’s scrupulously researched, very fluidly written and closely argued book forces us to reexamine our assumptions about the supposed myopia of Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson as they imposed their settlement on the defeated Central Powers and their allies. . . . To blame Versailles for Hitler’s war is to let both him and the appeasers off the hook.”
—Andrew Roberts, The Sunday Telegraph (London)
From the Inside Flap:
National Bestseller
"New York Times Editors' Choice
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award
of the Council on Foreign Relations
Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
For six months in 1919, after the end of "the war to end all wars," the Big Three--President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau--met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities--Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them--born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.