World War I: The Great War

"On the eve of World War I, strange accidents in a small Protestant village in Northern Germany involve the children and teenagers of a choir run by the schoolteacher and their families. The abused and suppressed children of the villagers seem to be at the heart of this mystery as these events gradually take on the character of a punishment ritual."
Publisher's site

"The First World War was waged through the participation not just of soldiers but of men, women, and children on the home front. Mass-produced, full-color, large-format war posters were both a sign and an instrument of this historic shift in warfare. War posters celebrated, in both their form and content, the modernity of the conflict. They also reached an enormous international audience through their prominent display and continual reproduction in pamphlets and magazines in every combatant nation, uniting diverse populations as viewers of the same image and bringing them closer, in an imaginary and powerful way, to the war."
Publisher's site

"WWI marked a watershed in the relations between individual citizens and the state. The ferocious collective of modern war proved more intrusive on life than perhaps any other enterprise in human history. This intrusion helped to merge individual identities into new interest groups that competed for position and societal groupings...[T]hemes of authority and identity--how states establish new mechanisms of control; how individuals sought to define themselves--unite [these] stimulating and important essays...Examples of the volumes broad amusements and censorship in wartime Germany; Kents discussion of female nurses near-frontline experience produced a split in the rhetoric and programs of postwar British feminism; Steinbergs depiction of Russian efforts to organize a modern general staff; and Winters somber portrait of the communities of grief created by this conflict. The collections thoughtful coverage and imaginative treatment make it useful for upper-division undergraduates and important for graduate students and specialists."
Choice

"World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In his riveting narrative, Hochschild brings it to life as never before while focusing on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes."
Publisher's site

"Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is widely recognised as one of the greatest voices of the First World War. His self-appointed task was to speak for the men in his care, to show the 'Pity of War'.
Owen's enduring and influential poetry is evidence of his bleak realism, his energy and indignation, his compassion and his great technical skill."
The Wilfred Owen Association

"A brief but comprehensive survey of British society and culture during the First World War. George Robb concentrates not on military campaigns and battle strategies, but on the lives of ordinary Britons - how they responded to and were affected by the war, how they attempted to understand the conflict and to explain it to others, and how they have dealt with the war's legacies in the years since. Robb synthesizes the most recent work on the social and cultural history of the war, as well as reclaiming many forgotten popular cultural sources such as films, cartoons, advertisements and pulp novels."
Publisher's website

"With erudition lightly worn, Harvard historian Pipes, in this massive, wonderfully vivid, gripping chronicle, stresses the role of liberals both in the Russian revolution of 1905, for which the Communists later claimed credit, and in the upheavals of 1917. He attributes the failure of the February 1917 revolution to Alexander Kerensky's rash actions, his doctrinaire vision of democracy and his dissolution of the police and the provincial bureaucracy, which plunged the nation into anarchy. He argues persuasively that the Bolsheviks' October 1917 putsch was not a true revolution, but a classic coup d'etat. His portrayal of the backward Russian peasantry, scarcely touched by westernization, and of the intelligentsia, "self-appointed spokesman" for over nine-tenths of the populace, lays the groundwork for his discerning analysis of how Lenin built a one-party dictatorship. No other book so brilliantly clarifies the inner dynamics of the Russian Revolution"
Publisher's Weekly