Margaret MacMillan

Margaret Olwen MacMillan

Describes the six months following the end of the First World War when leaders of the great powers, as well as men and women from all over the world, all with their own agendas, converged on Paris to shape the peace, including Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, T. E. Lawrence, Churchill, W. E. B. Dubois, and others. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Six Months that Changed the World

Paris 1919

Chris Aldrich

An excellent overall read. Though it primarily covers the peace negotiations at the end of the Great War, this is an excellent primer on the backgrounds and histories of most of the major countries in the world for most of the last 300 years if not longer in many cases. It quickly puts the political situations at the end of WWI into perspective and indirectly shows why some of the continuing strife, battles, and wars since then have taken shape the way they have.

Thought not stated directly in the text, the author is the granddaughter of Lloyd George, a fact which should be taken into consideration in her presentation of the material, though as a well-respected historian, she does seem to provide both the good and bad with respect to his character and actions throughout the work and even goes so far as to say he sugar-coated his own memoirs blaming problems in the peace on the Americans and French.

In particular, I was thrilled to see some significant coverage of many areas of Europe about which little seems to be said in many history books including areas of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the war. Given current affairs, I would have appreciated more background and disposition on the situation in the middle east at the time, but the coverage here is on par with the multitude of other countries which require coverage here. 

Most of the writing after the introductory chapters is actually fairly modular, so those who are interested in certain countries and nationalities can easily read the sections/chapters on those areas of the world without missing out on too much in a general sense. Though the author certainly could have gone much further afield and into much greater depth on any of the subjects, she certainly did an excellent job of distilling a range of histories, politics, and personalities relating to the peace conference into a coherent and cogent whole without losing the thread of a generally excellent narrative. I am thoroughly impressed at both what was covered here as how it was covered.

Though there were some very excellent maps presented in the book -- and certainly more than most of its type -- like most texts on world affairs and history, I always feel like there could have been a few more, or at least additional close ups of particular areas as well as other locations and areas of interest indicated which were discussed within the text. 

Despite some of my critical statements above, I would highly recommend this to anyone.

Jeni Enjaian

I really enjoyed this book. Having studied the portrayal by the New York Times of the Armenian Genocide, I was aware of the Paris Peace Conference and its inaction concerning the "Armenian Question." That, unfortunately, summed up my limited knowledge of the Peace Conference. This book greatly expanded my knowledge and increased my hunger to learn more about WWI including the causes, events, historical actors and aftermath. 
This book was incredibly detailed but comprehensible to almost anyone with a slightly higher than normal reading level. This detail highlighted the little-known tremendous complexities that individual men, albeit world leaders, tried to solve as they created a new world order. This book also demonstrated how little of that effort translated into lasting change and how much contributed to the onset of WWII. 

I highly recommend this book and have already added it to my amazon wish list.

Paris 1919 Six Months that Changed the World

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