Quote:
Originally Posted by jmilica
The causes, apart from re-balancing the international order, were many and deep, and they do go far back from the year 1914. But trying to put the guilt for the war on Serbia and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for me is not only rewriting and recreating the history which more than obviously shows this was only the casus belli, it is an insult to a thinking mind...If you consider all the great powers involved, the preparations which were happening on a military level for a long time prior to 1914, and then check the map and see where and how big Serbia was at the time, I guess you might feel something similar.
Anyway, the ebook edition is brilliantly formatted and I really did my best to read it despite the advise of my friends and colleagues who told me that there is no point in it. I had to drop it after first part of the book and leave the second and third part unread...
But, I am sure for many readers it will be a brilliant read, especially for ones who so far have not had deeper interest in the Great War. And I am writing this for them, hoping they will not take this book as an ultimate history account but as just one (and not very much facts based) "modern treatment" of the past.
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I'll respond as more length later, but for now I'd like to quote Niall
Ferguson on
The Sleepwalkers.
Quote:
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Christopher Clark has written the most readable account of the origins of the First World War since Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. The difference is that The Sleepwalkers is a lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the bigggest collective blunder in the history of international relations.
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I haven't read this yet, but I have a hard time believing that a prize-winning professor of history at Cambridge has managed to write a highly praised book that somehow manages to ignore or obfuscate the facts. I understand you disagree with his interpretation of them; just the same, I have to impute some validity to his theories. And in passing, I've read literally hundreds of books about the First World War.
I do think some revisionist theories are nuts: that Haig was a master strategist, for example. But I'm not prepared to throw out what Clark has to say. It would be great if this book were picked, so we could all have at it.