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The Lost History Of 1914
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
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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.
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