IF YOU READ ONLY ONE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR I IN YOUR life, make sure Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War isn’t it. For starters, the book isn’t really a history, or even a systemic commentary on what, to much of Europe, remains the major event of the 20th century. Ferguson defines his task as “explaining” the war. He does so with a loosely linked collection of essays, arguments and speculations on the course, causes and results of the struggle that, over four years, drew in a dozen nations, destroyed three empires, killed about 10 million people, and became midwife to the Soviet Union, the Third Reich and, finally, World War II. It’s too soon to say, perhaps, but it could be argued that this “Great War” did to post-Renaissance Europe in four years what the Middle Ages took four centuries to do to the Roman Empire.That’s a lot of territory for even Ferguson’s 462 dense pages — not counting 100 pages of notes, biography and index — to cover. Yet it’s been done, again and again (by Martin Gilbert, Barbara Tuchman, Basil Liddell-Hart et al.), and usually with a humility that Ferguson, a Young Turk historian from Scotland with a strong suit in statistics, rather alarmingly lacks.
Source: Cruel Britannia | L.A. Weekly