Purchase

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Add to Wish List

Also by Jack Beatty:

The Lost History Of 1914, February 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
Age Of Betrayal, April 2008
Paperback

THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914
By: Jack Beatty

Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began

Bloomsbury USA
February 2012
On Sale: February 14, 2012
384 pages
ISBN: 0802778119
EAN: 9780802778116
Kindle: B00719LP48
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction

In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. "Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war," Beatty writes. "This one maps the multiple paths that led away from it."

Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them-a possible military coup in Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought détente with Germany-might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's hands, these stories open into epiphanies of national character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors-Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II , Woodrow Wilson, along with forgotten or overlooked characters such as Pancho Villa, Rasputin, and Herbert Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution, and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to head it off. Beatty's powerful rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 which killed more than one million men, restores lost history, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy.

Beatty's deeply insightful book-as elegantly written as it is thought-provoking and probing-lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called "the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century." It also arms readers against narratives of historical inevitability in today's world.

Media Buzz

PBS News Hour - August 6, 2014
On Point - February 27, 2012