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Noticing a new book in the library about the start of World War One, I decided to sign it out. In that particular conflict's dark mythology, the disparity between its final consequences and the usual perceptions of how it flared up can lead to a sense of the sudden disintegration of everything prosperous Europeans a century ago believed in, and more perspective does seem useful.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, does seem a fairly scholarly work, but one with its own narrative. In seeing it spread "the blame" around, though, I did begin to wonder if it was trying to argue against the specific "blame" apportioned by other works to Austria-Hungary and Germany, such that those countries and their leadership were being presented at last in a special position of reasonableness. Perhaps I'm contrasting that against wondering if slices of the English-speaking nations, patting themselves on the back over being "the good guys" in World War Two, don't take well the questioning of whether particular things done along the way to victory should be acceptable for all time. There was an interesting idea for me in the book, anyway, when it was suggested both sides were motivated by the impression Russia was about to take off on its own industrial revolution and become the "superpower" the Soviet Union wound up as. That does contrast to the usual narrative of the country falling apart in the course of the war, but then Clark did seem to present in the most positive light Austria-Hungary, another state that went to pieces at the end of the war, and argues the contemporary impression of it as a declining power was unfair.
I did find myself contrasting the book to the last volume on the start of World War One I'd read, David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, which seems less detailed and more aimed at a "general audience," only to find that book mentioned in the very first endnote. I also thought a bit of a completely different book with the same main title, Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, a history of the development of the heliocentric theory interesting enough as a biography of Kepler, but seemingly putting Copernicus and Galileo in the worst light and ending with the perhaps dubious attempt to say the history just described proves science ought to accept extra-sensory perception.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, does seem a fairly scholarly work, but one with its own narrative. In seeing it spread "the blame" around, though, I did begin to wonder if it was trying to argue against the specific "blame" apportioned by other works to Austria-Hungary and Germany, such that those countries and their leadership were being presented at last in a special position of reasonableness. Perhaps I'm contrasting that against wondering if slices of the English-speaking nations, patting themselves on the back over being "the good guys" in World War Two, don't take well the questioning of whether particular things done along the way to victory should be acceptable for all time. There was an interesting idea for me in the book, anyway, when it was suggested both sides were motivated by the impression Russia was about to take off on its own industrial revolution and become the "superpower" the Soviet Union wound up as. That does contrast to the usual narrative of the country falling apart in the course of the war, but then Clark did seem to present in the most positive light Austria-Hungary, another state that went to pieces at the end of the war, and argues the contemporary impression of it as a declining power was unfair.
I did find myself contrasting the book to the last volume on the start of World War One I'd read, David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, which seems less detailed and more aimed at a "general audience," only to find that book mentioned in the very first endnote. I also thought a bit of a completely different book with the same main title, Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, a history of the development of the heliocentric theory interesting enough as a biography of Kepler, but seemingly putting Copernicus and Galileo in the worst light and ending with the perhaps dubious attempt to say the history just described proves science ought to accept extra-sensory perception.