Book description
In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view
of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant
assumption that it was inevitable. Beatty presents the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand not as the catalyst of a war that would have
broken out over some other crisis, but rather as "its all-but
unique precipitant." Beatty shows how a possible military coup in
Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; or the murder trial of the
wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought detente with
Germany, might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end.
In Beatty's hands, these stories open out into epiphanies of national
character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major
actors--Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II, Wilson, Churchill, Emperor
Francis Joseph, along with forgotten or overlooked characters like
Pancho Villa, Rasputin, Sir Edward Carson, and Hoover. Europe's ruling
classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they
mistook democratization for revolution and were tempted to "escape
forward" into war to head it off. Beatty concludes with a powerful
rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 that killed
more than a million men, the murderous culmination of the "cult of
the offensive" that gripped pre-war general staffs. He restores
lost history here as well, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted
as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy. Beatty's deeply
insightful book lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what
George Kennan called "the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth
century" and arms readers against narratives of historical
inevitability in today's world. Illuminated and enlivened...
[Beatty's] ability to hot-wire our history to the here and now is what
gives Age of Betrayal its distinctive bite. Los Angeles Times Book
Review on The Age of Betrayal Readers will immediately by impressed by
the range of subject matter he can handle, from political, economic, and
constitutional history to the history of labor, social movements and
time... Absorbing in its detail and refreshingly uncompromising in its
perspective. Boston Globe on The Age of Betrayal In The Lost History
of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I,
testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was
inevitable. Beatty presents the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand not as the catalyst of a war that would have broken out over
some other crisis, but rather as "its all-but unique
precipitant." Beatty shows how a possible military coup in Germany;
an imminent civil war in Britain; or the murder trial of the wife of the
likely next premier of France, who sought detente with Germany, might
have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's
hands, these stories open out into epiphanies of national character, and
offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors--Kaiser Wilhelm,
Tsar Nicholas II, Wilson, Churchill, Emperor Francis Joseph, along with
forgotten or overlooked characters like Pancho Villa, Rasputin, Sir
Edward Carson, and Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were
so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for
revolution and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to
head it off. Beatty concludes with a powerful rendering of the combat
between August 1914 and January 1915 that killed more than a million
men, the murderous culmination of the "cult of the offensive"
that gripped pre-war general staffs. He restores lost history here as
well, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory,
was actually a life-saving strategy. Beatty's deeply insightful book
lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called
"the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century" and arms
readers against narratives of historical inevitability in today's world.
