What We're Reading About World War One: Non-Fiction

Here's a place where folks can chat and share thoughts on the non-fiction tomes they are reading in honor of (or in memory of) the centenary of the outbreak of World War I the summer of 1914.

If you're looking for ideas of what book to read, there's a thread for that too! And you can find it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/163004#

Happy reading!

I finished and reviewed Tolkien and the Great War on my thread here. It was amazing, and I can highly recommend it to everyone, even those who aren't necessarily Tolkien fans.

Glad you liked it, inge87. I thought it was excellent when i read it just over a year ago, but as a definite Tolkien enthusiast I was not sure whether it would appeal as much to those who are not such fans. But I think that on the one hand the detailed factual account of the war experiences of one man and his close friends gives a great human perspective on the madness, and then the final section reflecting on Tolkien's literary response to war in the context of other war poets and novelists is fascinating.

Added to the group wiki.

>4 drneutron:, There's a group wiki? I hadn't seen one.

Yup. Link's always on the group home page in the intro section. And also here!

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Groups:75booksin2014

Happened to listen to one of the last of Richard Heffner's "Open Mind" interviews in Public Television (Heffnar passed away in October) and the topic was a goodie.

America's Greatest Blunder is a book that asks the musical question - what if America had NOT intervened on the side of the Allies in 1918? What if we sat on the sidelines (As Wilson always wanted us to anyway) until the combatants wore each other down and eventually dragged themselves to the peace table.

Burt Pines is an interesting and provocative writer and he makes his points well. His thesis is that the warring parties would have made peace "sooner or later" , and there would have been no "blaming" Germany for the war, and no punitive Versailles treaty and so --- no Hitler and no World War II. Ok, Maybe.

But his scenario leaves four countries mourning their dead and not having much of a much to show for it. You can certainly see the populace angry with the leaders who had led them into war. Would governments have fallen in England and France? Would the Communists have taken power? Ok, Maybe.

And would Russia - smarting from the punishing treaty Germany forced the infant Red Russian government to sign - raise up angry again? Sooner or later, yes, I think.

And The Great War was America's "Hat in the Ring" on the world stage - what would a strictly isolationist America look like after the guns were stilled? Not even a guess here.

Provocative book and I read it in a sitting. (I'm a big alt-history buff).

Helps to know your way around to read it. But good.

I love "what if" questions. There's a book being offered on January's ER list that suggests that had Franz Ferdinand lived, there would have been no WWI, and in that case, what would the world look like today? I'm not altogether sure the premise is correct -- had that not been the match that ignited, I suspect something else would have done the job at some point in the next year or two. But it's a fun intellectual exercise!

Yeah, it's an interesting question to ask but I'm with you and I think something else would have caused the outbreak had it not been for the death of Franz Ferdinand. The countries involved had been planning for war for decades, no one was surprised it happened.

I read World War One: History in an Hour last night and was less than impressed with it. There were so many typographical errors that I'm not sure I can trust it to get the facts straight. (For instance, Albert Zimmermann is referred to as Alfred Zimmermann, when it's already confusing enough keeping him straight from Arthur Zimmermann of Zimmermann Telegraph fame.) I've checked out the ebook of The First World War: A Very Short Introduction to see if this will do what I hoped the other one would do: give me a brief overview of the war as a starting point for this year's war reading.

I finished a WWI memoir that I found readable and compelling: A Subaltern's War by Charles Edmund Carrington. The full title, A Subaltern's War, being a memoir of the Great War from the point of view of a romantic young man, with candid accounts of two particular battles, written shortly after they occurred, and an essay on militarism, gives a good summary of what to expect. The two battles are The Somme and 3rd Ypres. My review for it is here

The First World War: A Very Short Introduction takes a chronological approach to the history of the war, and the emphasis is very much on military history. I'm more interested in social history than in military strategy so I found it a little dry in that respect. However, some of the books I've planned for later in the year will fill in that gap.

In the last two months I've managed two non-fiction books about World War One.

Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth was interesting but is more about the genesis of Tolkien's writing than the war itself. However, it does follow Tolkien and some of his friends through their war experiences, so there is some interesting comment, particularly from his friends' letters. I think the war is more of a sidebar - the author is more interested in Tolkien's writing than anything else - there's a lot of literary criticism.

Catastrophe by Max Hastings was a great introduction to the first six months of the war. I learned a great deal about the whole "stumbling into war" process. It is well-written and very accessible. There was a whole lot about the 'other' fronts of the war that I hadn't encountered before. Highly recommended.

Big fan of Max Hastings.

Worked my way through his book on World War II in Japan last year.

I'll have to get hold of Catastrophe

>14 magicians_nephew:, if you're into kindle, it was going cheap recently on Amazon.

ETA Blast - it has gone back up in price, again!

I finished John Keegan's The First World War, a military history of the war. Keegan's style isn't as engaging as, say, David McCullough, but with a little effort it's understandable for lay readers like me.

I recently finished Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda. It deals with a lot more than the First World War, but Korda did an excellent job of explaining the goals and strategies Lawrence used during the Arab uprising against the Turks. I'd never been much for military tactics but this book got me to see them in a whole new light.

17. Oooh, sounds very good. Might have to get hold of that one.

I finished a couple of collections of WWI poetry: Calligrams by Guillaume Apollinaire and World War One British Poets edited by Candace Ward. The British poets collection seems like a representative sample of war poets and was a nice introduction to a genre I don't often read.

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I is more an account of the three monarchies as Wilhelm's reign in Germany overlapped more than a decade of Victoria's reign, all of Edward VII's reign, and several years of Nicholas's father's reign. Young George gets quite a bit of attention, but the adult George disappears for a good chunk of the book until he becomes king. Misleading title aside, it's a thorough account of the failed attempts of the three monarchies to avoid war.

I just finished Last Post: the final word from our First World War Soldiers by Max Arthur - as the title suggests, it consists of the results of interviews with surviving WWI veterans - in fact with all 21 British veterans still alive when the book was being researched, in 2005. By the time the book was published in 2006, all but 4 of them had died, and the last surviving veteran, Harry Patch, died in 2009. Very much a Last Post, therefore - this bit of oral history was researched and written just in time.

This is the perspective from ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen from the bottom up - pretty well all of them were in the ranks not serving as even junior officers. All the men were centenarians when they were interviewed, ranging from about 104-108 in age. They were all of course very young during the time of WWI, most only serving for the last year or 6 months of the war (a few served a little longer having lied about their age to join up at 17), though several continued to serve after the Armistice was signed. Some chapters are very short, recounting memories mainly of the war experience itself, but others are much longer and more detailed, and most tell quite a bit about the long lives lived after the men came home from war. There is a lot of common ground (quite a few recount the same details about struggling to deal with lice in the trenches, using a candle to burn them out of the seams of their uniforms) but much variety also, both in the war experiences, and in the lives that followed and the outlook on life. Few had much time for politicians though.

#21
Very interesting. I always find it poignet to read these kinds of accounts or hear interviews with veterans. I remember hearing about the death of Harry Patch and noting that he was the last male WWI veteran in the UK. However, he was not the last veteran. The last WWI veteran in the UK was Florence Green. She died in 2012. The last living combat veteran from WWI was an American veteran - Frank Buckles of the U. S. He died in 2011. It always gripes me with these kinds of books that nobody thinks of the women.

>22 benitastrnad: True, the book was entirely about male veterans. The author did not even mention the possibility of interviewing the surviving women who had been in any form of active service. You've made me curious about Florence Green - and what branch of the services she was involved in.

*goes to google her* ...

Apparently she was in the Women's Royal Air Force, joining in Sept 1918 aged 17, and serving as an officer's mess steward in RAF Marham, then called Narborough airfield (Norfolk). According to one of her obituaries, 'Florence’s story came to light in 2009, after a local newspaper story about her great longevity. The article was spotted by Andrew Holmes, a British researcher who tracks and verifies reports of so-called “supercentenarians” – people who live well beyond 100. He tracked down her service record at the National Archives, and she was subsequently recognised as a veteran of the war.'