[issybird]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I don't know if everyone had the same experience, but in my copy of the book—purchased from Amazon—I found quite a few typos.

The epub from Kobo was the same.

Originally Posted by BelleZora

The descriptions of the battles and life in the trenches was hard to read.

I've read a lot of memoirs set in the trenches as well as histories and fctions and they make me sick and I've had enough. I thought that the weakest part of this book, as I willing to take it as a given. I just finished Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road and I found it ultimately too predictable. With all the searing memoirs, I guess I'm over the fictional accounts.

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Interesting you should say that. Today I finally bought The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman,.

I read it years ago and couldn't remember it at all, so this past spring I listened to the audiobook as read by Nadia May, which I highly recommend. It's over 50 years past publication and it seemed to me as fresh as anything which has come out for the centenary.

I'm going to repeat most of what I said in my earlier post. I think this is a terrific book. Eksteins’s synthesis of the various forms of modern art as both representative of the mindset that led to the Great War and the outgrowth of the carnage is provocative and compelling. He does a wonderful job evoking a world on the cusp and the day to day reality at the individual level that engendered a seismic societal shift.

I especially like the analysis of conditions and the mindset in Germany leading to the war. In my reading about the Great War, it’s always Germany that’s the stumbling block to my understanding. It’s easy to see what motivated the Kaiser and the officer class, less so why they got such popular support. It’s also fascinating to see Germany as the vanguard of modernity especially when the Nazi regime would force a return to classicism and kitsch.

That said, I think sometimes Eksteins’s arguments get away from him. I don’t think he adequately supports all his contentions. Moreover, I think he gets carried away by language and ends up not getting his point across; I’m sure he knew what he meant, but the reader has to take it on faith. Often I’d read a sentence, stop and think, “What is he trying to say here?” go back and reread and then give up. It shows how he internalized the zeitgeist in that he’s very fond of paradox, but ultimately paradox, while expressive of a situation, begs the question. But perhaps I’m just tired of paradox as a rhetorical device, as it was popular in early 20th century writing, which I’ve been reading lately.

Eksteins also concentrates on the protagonists in the west. The backward-looking Russian and Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empires get relatively little mention, and I don’t think they fit his thesis as well, but I also can see how the book would have gotten too big.

I hadn't planned it that way, but a book I'm currently reading, The Generation of 1914, by Robert Wohl, is any interesting juxtaposition. Where Eksteins focuses on high culture and the performing and plastic arts, Wohl's focus is on broad culture, especially writing, coming out of the middle class. While Eksteins is the better read and more exciting and even enlightening in its connections, I find I'm ultimately more persuaded by Wohl. I think there's a longer lag for high culture to penetrate and express the mindset of even the educated classes than Eksteins suggests. Wohll also gives equal weight to all the major combatants. A heads up, though, for anyone who's interested, is that the formatting of my epub from Kobo is appalling. It's the next thing to being entirely unreadable.