Short Synopsis
Award-winning author Adam Hochschild explores the First World War with a particular focus on the conflict between the critics and the supporters of the war.

Full 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?

"[Hochschild] has written an original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"An ambitious narrative that presents a teeming worldview through intimate, human portraits." ---Kirkus

"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

"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

"Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story [of World War I], and explores it in provocative ways." ---The Washington Post

"This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard." ---The New York Times

"Listeners are treated to Morey's passionate reading…keep[ing] things lively, especially when leavening in personal narratives and surprising expressions of humanity during the war.…Informative and entertaining, this is a palatable version of monumental events that continue to animate the course of our world." ---Booklist Audio Review

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