The Pity of War: 1914 - 1918 - Softcover

Ferguson, Niall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140275231 ISBN 13: 9780140275230

Publisher: Penguin, 2009

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date :2009-03-26 Pages: 672 Language: English Publisher: Penguin Books Niall Fergusons The Pity of War: 1914-1918 is a provocative and boldly-conceived history that explodes many of the myths surrounding the First World War. The First World War killed around eight million men and bled Europe dry. In this provocative book Niall Ferguson asks: was the sacrifice worth it Was it all really an inevitable cataclysm and were the Germans a genuine threat Was the war. as is often asserted. greeted with popular enthusiasm Why did men keep on fighting when conditions were so wretched Was there in fact a death wish abroad. driving soldiers to their own destructionThe war. he argues. was a disaster - but not for the reasons we think. Far worse than a tragedy. it was the greatest error of modern history.

About this title

Review:

If someone less distinguished than Niall Ferguson--a fellow and tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, Oxford--had written The Pity of Waryou could be forgiven for thinking that he was a man in search of a few cheap headlines by contradicting almost every accepted orthodoxy about World War I.

Ferguson argues that Britain was as much to blame for the start of the war as was German militarism, and that had Britain sacrificed Belgium to Germany, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would never have happened, Germany would have created a united European state, and Britain could have remained a superpower. He also contends that there was little enthusiasm for the war in Britain in 1914, but equally he claims that it was not prolonged by clever manipulation of the media. Instead, he purports that the reason men fought was because they enjoyed it. He also maintains that it wasn't the severity of the conditions imposed on Germany at Versailles in 1919 that led inexorably to World War II; rather it was the comparative leniency and the failure to collect reparations in full.

The Pity of War has no pretensions to offering the grand narrative of World War I. Instead it reads like a polemical tract; as such it is immensely readable, well-researched, and controversial. You may not end up agreeing with all of Ferguson's arguments, but that should not deter you from reading it. All of us need our deeply-held views challenged from time to time; if only to remind us why we've got them. --John Crace

Review:

The most challenging and provocative analysis of the First World War to date (Ian Kershaw)

Must take a permanent place at the top of the War's historiography. It is one of the very few books whose own scale matches that of the events it describes (Alan Clark Daily Telegraph)

Brilliant and stimulating ... radical, readable and convincing (The Times)

Possibly the most important book to appear in years both on the origins of the First World War ... Ferguson can confidently claim to have inherited A. J. P. Taylor's mantle (Paul Kennedy New York Review of Books)

At one massive stroke, Niall Ferguson has transformed the intellectual landscape (Economist)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0140275231
• ISBN 13: 9780140275230
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672