Book description
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.
Adam Hochschild is an award-winning author of six books, mostly on
subjects related to human rights. King Leopold's Ghost was the
winner of the prestigious Duff Cooper Prize and Bury the Chains
was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He lives in San Francisco
and teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of
California at Berkeley.
