To End All Wars
A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
By Adam Hochschild
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780618758289, 480pp.)
Publication Date: May 2011
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Compact Disc, Compact Disc, MP3 CD
Categories: Military - World War I
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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?
ADAM HOCHSCHILD has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. In King Leopold’s Ghost, Bury the Chains, and other books, Hochschild has earned a reputation as a master of suspense and vivid character portrayal. His skill at evoking such struggles for justice has made him a finalist for the National Book Award and won him a host of other prizes.
Historian Adam Hochschild traces the patriotic fervor that catapulted Great Britain into war during the summer of 1914 â?? as well as the small, but determined British pacifist movement â?? in his historical narrative To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. More at NPR.org
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Historian Adam Hochschild traces the patriotic fervor that catapulted Great Britain into war during the summer of 1914 â?? as well as the small, but determined British pacifist movement â?? in his historical narrative To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. More at NPR.org
NPR Audio Player Requires Flash Upgrade: Please upgrade your plug-in to view this content.
Adam Hochschild's pensive narrative history, To End All Wars, focuses on those who fought â?? and also on those who refused. Hochschild is a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it's challenged. More at NPR.org
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"In this deeply moving history of the so-called Great War, those opposing its mindless folly receive equal billing with the politicians, generals, and propagandists obdurately insisting on its perpetuation. Implicit in Adam Hochschild's account is this chilling warning: once governments become captive of wars they purport to control, they turn next on their own people."--Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War
"Adam Hochschild is the rare historian who fuses deep scholarship with novelistic flair. In his hands, World War I becomes a clash not only of empires and armies, but of individuals: king and Kaiser, warriors and pacifists, coal miners and aristocrats. Epic yet human-scaled, this is history for buffs and novices alike, a stirring and provocative exploration of the Great War and the nature of war itself". -Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange
"In prose as compelling as a masterful novel, Hochschild illuminates the lives of those who consigned millions to oblivion, and also introduces us to those who fiercely opposed the carnage—those who imagined, as we might, that the world could be otherwise. We emerge from this exemplary book with the knowledge that war is not inevitable, and those who work for its abolition inherit their dedication from sane men and women of great moral strength who recognized, as we must, that the future depended upon them. Hochschild’s accomplishment, as a writer and historian, is formidable and inspiring."- Carolyn Forché, editor of AGAINST FORGETTING: 20th Century Poetry of Witness
"The lives of the author’s many characters dovetail elegantly in this moving, accessible book...An ambitious narrative that presents a teeming worldview through intimate, human portraits."- Kirkus Reviews
"An original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place . . . Hochschild paints equally vivid, painful portraits of now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
"In this deeply moving history of the so-called Great War, those opposing its mindless folly receive equal billing with the politicians, generals, and propagandists obdurately insisting on its perpetuation. Implicit in Adam Hochschild's account is this chilling warning: once governments become captive of wars they purport to control, they turn next on their own people." -- Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War
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