Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War
The event will include a brief reception followed by a lecture with an introduction by Susan Eisenhower, a question and answer session, and a book signing.
From Knopf: In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also re-creates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas. Hastings gives us frank assessments of generals and political leaders and masterly analyses of the political currents that led the continent to war. He argues passionately against the contention that the war was not worth the cost, maintaining that Germany’s defeat was vital to the freedom of Europe. Throughout we encounter statesmen, generals, peasants, housewives and private soldiers of seven nations in Hastings’s accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts: generals dismounting to lead troops in bayonet charges over 1,500 feet of open ground; farmers who at first decried the requisition of their horses; infantry men engaged in a haggard retreat, sleeping four hours a night in their haste. This is a vivid new portrait of how a continent became embroiled in war and what befell millions of men and women in a conflict that would change everything.
Hastings is a distinguished author, journalist and broadcaster whose work is internationally recognized. He has published twenty-three books in nearly forty years. Many of his books were inspired by his work as a journalist, reporting eleven conflicts, including Vietnam and the 1982 South Atlantic war. Sir Max has received many awards. In 1982 he was awarded Journalist of The Year and Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards. He was knighted in 2002 for his services to journalism. He has twice been awarded the Westminster Medal of the RUSI for his lifetime contribution to Military Literature first in 2008, and again in 2012. The Pritzker Military Library of Chicago presented him with its Literary Award for lifetime achievement in 2012. Sir Max writes regularly for some of Great Britain’s most notable newspapers; the Daily Mail and the Financial Times, of which he is a contributing editor.
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
IP Address: 18.223.172.252 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
") are described as follows: