Storm of 1914

About This Book

In the summer of 1914, a pistol shot in Sarajevo set off a chain reaction that pulled the great powers of Europe — and then the world — into a war no one quite intended and few could stop. By 1918, four empires had collapsed, a generation lay dead or broken, and the map of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the colonial world had been redrawn in ways that still burn.

This is a complete, single-volume history of the First World War: the alliance system and the July Crisis; the Western Front's trenches and the Eastern Front's vast mobility; Gallipoli, the Middle East, Africa, and the war at sea; the home fronts, propaganda, and the entry of the United States; the Russian Revolution's collision with total war; and the bitter peace of Versailles that planted the seeds of the next catastrophe.

Clear, paced, and unsparing, it gives the general reader the whole war — not only the famous battles, but the industrial slaughter, the influenza, the women in factories, and the ideas that outlived the armistice.