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

Author: Adam Hochschild

Narrator: Arthur Morey

Unabridged: 16 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/04/2011


Synopsis

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?

About Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild is the author of a number of books, including Half the Way Home, The Mirror at Midnight, and The Unquiet Ghost. Three of his books, including King Leopold's Ghost, have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. Adam has also written for the New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He teaches writing in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by William on 2013-02-21 16:30:34

For me, this has been the most informative of WW1 books Ive read. Tuckman is more tedious and densethan Hochschild. I now understand the byzantine plays and counterplays triggering WW1. I also have a new, morbid understanding of the horrors of trench warfare. I also now understand why the German army surrendered at a time when they were seemingly in the ascendant. Furthermore, the narrator is easy to understand and reads at an interesting, varied pace. All in all, TO END ALL WARS is an excellent production.

Goodreads review by L

"When this century collapses, dead at last, And its sleep within the dark tomb has begun, Come, look down upon us, world, file past And be ashamed of what our age has done. Inscribe our stone, that everyone may see What this dead era valued most and best: Science, progress, work, technology And death......more

I think for many Americans this book will be something of a shocker. It tells the story of the British anti-war movement during World War I. First is the story of the enormous incompetence of those prosecuting the war; the highest ranking authority on the civil side was Prime Minister Asquith, and o......more