To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 [Paperback]

In this riveting and suspensefulNew York Timesbest-selling book, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before&

World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war stands as one of historys most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation.

To End All Warsfocuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the wars critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Many of these dissenters were thrown in jail for their opposition to the war, from a future Nobel Prize winner to an editor behind bars who distributed a clandestine newspaper on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britains 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.

Hochschild forces us to confront the big questions: Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldnt cooler heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history?US

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 ofWashington 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 aristocratlƒ*