Legacy of the Great War Part 1
Explore the definitive books on World War I legacy, from Richard Holmes' *Tommy* and Barbara Tuchman's *The Guns of August* to *Paris 1919* and *The Pity of War*—essential history, soldiers' stories, and fiction on the Great War's enduring impact.
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Rites of Spring
by Modris Eksteins
Looks at the origins and impact of World War I, discusses the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet, and analyzes public opinion of the period.
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Tommy
by Richard Holmes
This history of World War I puts the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage. It tells the story of this epic and terrible war through the letters, diaries and memories of those who fought it.
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August 1914
by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn
Expanded by Solzhenitsyn to almost twice the length of the original edition, this novel reconstructs the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolupin and the outbreak of the First World War
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The Proud Tower
by Barbara W. Tuchman
The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. The Proud Tower, The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era.
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The Guns of August
by Barbara W. Tuchman
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages. The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era
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Paris 1919
by Margaret MacMillan
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.
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The Pity of War
by Niall Ferguson
In this landmark work of history, Ferguson vividly brings back to life this terrifying period and makes a simple and provocative argument: that the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. 34 illustrations.
