White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1918 - Hardcover

THOMPSON, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571223338 ISBN 13: 9780571223336

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2008

Synopsis

The Western Front dominates our memories of the First World War. Yet, a million and half men died in North East Italy in a war that need never have happened, when Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire in May 1915. Led by General Luigi Cadorna, the most ruthless of all the Great War commanders, waves of Italian conscripts were sent charging up the limestone hills north of Trieste to be massacred by troops fighting to save their homelands. This is a great, tragic military history of a war that gave birth to fascism. Mussolini fought in these trenches, but so did many of the greatest modernist writers in Italian and German - Ungaretti, Gadda, Musil, Hemingway. It is through these accounts that Mark Thompson, with great skill and empathy, brings to life this forgotten conflict.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Thompson lives in Oxford. He is the author of A Paper House, a much-praised account of the fall of Yugoslavia. He worked for the UN in the Balkans for much of the 1990s.

Review

The Weekly Standard
“[A] study as pioneering as it is brilliant.... Drawing on an impressive array of British, Italian, and Austrian sources, including fascinating interviews with survivors, Thompson re-creates the Italo-Austrian conflict in all its facets.... The White War is the work of a bright young historian proving his mettle.”

Dallas Morning News
“Thompson?s book is a comprehensive work following the causes, culture and combat of Italy?s war against Austria-Hungary and Germany.... It?s worthwhile reading and remembering, particularly when trying to comprehend what price victory.”

Robert Fox, Evening Standard
“Brilliant.... It is the first general history of the serial incompetence and brutality of the war in north-eastern Italy between 1915 and 1918, which makes it exceptional enough. In its elegant sweep of cultural and political as well as martial themes, it stands alone: it is one of the outstanding history books of the year.”

Christopher Duggan, Times Literary Supplement
“Mark Thompson?s wonderfully rich and poignant study, beautifully written and based on a detailed first-hand knowledge of the terrain in question as well as an impressive array of published Italian sources shows graphically why the events of 1915-18 had such a searing effect on the country?s national psyche.”



Max Hastings, New York Review of Books
“Mark Thompson, a young British writer, can claim a notable achievement with his narrative history of Italy?s World War I experience. With authority, sympathy, and unusual literary skill, he illuminates an aspect of the conflict about which some of us feel embarrassed to have known so little. The battlefield saga is sufficiently fascinating, but eclipsed by the portrait of Italy?s social and cultural experience within which the author sets it.... Thompson?s book gives a fascinating, indeed brilliant, portrait of a society immolated by its own delusions.”<

The Economist (Best Books of the Year)
“A startling indictment of the Italian state?s conduct during the first world war, which shows how Italy?s nationalist dream of expansion would turn into the Fascist nightmare.”

John McCourt, Irish Times
“Brilliant.... In presenting this conflict with such uncompromising focus and detail, Thompson has successfully accomplished a necessarily uncomfortable act of remembrance.... It should be hailed as the best account yet of what Hemingway described as `the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery? of the Great War and of the experiences of the vast majority of Italian soldiers who, in Giovanni Comisso?s words, had little or no knowledge of `what they had done, or why.?”

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571223338
• ISBN 13: 9780571223336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464