Adam Hochschild

Presents a history of World War I, focusing on the moral conflict between the proponents of the war and its critics in Great Britain.

A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

To End All Wars

jess

Haha guys I'm a history nerd but I've never actually finished a history book until now. Sue me. (And this is for a class I'm taking.)

That being said, that gives a lot of credit to how easy this is to read. It's structured more like a narrative than a history book; World War One doesn't even start until around a hundred pages in, because it's introducing all the characters. This isn't a comprehensive history of the front lines, though there is information about how it was. It's about all the players in the anti-war movement, some famous, some of which are not. Hochschild cleverly ties everyone together, showing how close the upper-class society of Britain was.

The meat of the books jumps back and forth from the Western Front to what's going on in Britain with those protesting against the war, and it was really interesting to learn about it. I, like many other people, pretty much only saw the war as Western Front and people liked to fight and it was heartbreaking and stuff like that so reading this book was really eye-opening. 

The epilogue and final chapter gave me chills, and perhaps it's because of the nature of the war itself, but it was really well-written.

Jeni Enjaian

This book was extremely disappointing. Usually with history books geared towards a more popular audience I can deal with the little bit of "dumbing down" that happens to make the book more accessible to more people. That's because, generally, the subject matter is intriguing enough to keep me reading and spark an interest in learning more about the topic.

This book, however, was all over the map. Hochschild rushed through the events of the war while throwing in occasional tidbits about random people he chose to profile. Even their introduction at the beginning of the book was rushed and I wasn't sure who was being highlighted. That's partly because he chose so many different characters. Two or three characters, at most, would have been more helpful. Also, he stated at the beginning of the book that he was going to follow these characters (real people, obviously) throughout the book to give a more nuanced history of the war than all other books about WWI. Instead, Hochschild devotes whole chapters, large portions of the book, to a loose narration of the events that omits any references to any of the characters he previously selected.

I do have one positive thing to say about this book. Hochschild devoted two distinct paragraphs to the Armenian Genocide, a subject that is often not mentioned at all in scholarly (though I hesitate to call this book scholarly) works about WWI.

As a lover of history and as an amateur historian, I highly recommend that everyone stay far away from this book. Right now I want to find a book on WWi that is actually decent to use as a palate cleanser from this book. (Hochschild's historiography is abysmal.)

World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.” Can we ever avoid repeating history?

Helen Bright

Pierke Bosschieter

MK Rosencrants

Alayna Jones 

Michael W

Vivian

Katie Egan

In this brilliant new work of history, Adam Hochschild follows a group of characters connected by blood ties, close friendships or personal enmities and shows how the war exposed the divisions between them. They include the brother and sister whose views on the war could not have been more diametrically opposed - he a career soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of those young men and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately supported the war and one of whom was equally passionately opposed to it. Through these divided families, Hochschild paints a vivid picture of Britain poised between the optimism of the Victorian era and the era of Auschwitz and the Gulag - a divided country, fractured by the seismic upheaval of the Great War and its aftermath.

To End All Wars A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

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