Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild - Available

To End All Wars

A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

by Adam Hochschild
Arthur Morey
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's 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.


Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars." Can we ever avoid repeating history?

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 4, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781452621319
      • File size: 473906 KB
      • Duration: 16:27:18

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Just how much a successful audiobook depends on the match of voice to text is demonstrated by Arthur Morey's excellent rendering of Hochschild's history of individual Britons' response to WWI. Initially, Morey may seem too mellow a voice for a military history, but Hochschild looks at loyalists as well as opponents to the war, and Morey wisely lets their words and the author's speak for themselves. Even those who know the history of The Great War will feel the anger and heartache build here. Best known as the author of KING LEOPOLD'S GHOSTS, the most damning of all books on the evils of European imperialism in Africa, Hochschild is an impressive historian and prose stylist. He requires, and gets in Morey, a narrator who measures feeling with restraint and can articulate every word clearly at the author's own pace. Hochschild focuses on individuals, but this is a book that encompasses the whole history of the war, its origins, and its awful toil. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 7, 2011
      WWI remains the quintessential war—unequaled in concentrated slaughter, patriotic fervor during the fighting, and bitter disillusion afterward, writes Hochschild. Many opposed it and historians mention this in passing, but Hochschild, winner of an L.A. Times Book Award for Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, has written an original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place. These mostly admirable activists include some veteran social reformers like the formidable Pankhursts, who led violent prosuffrage demonstrations from 1898 until 1914, and two members of which enthusiastically supported the war while one, Sylvia, opposed it, causing a permanent, bitter split. Sylvia worked with, and was probably the lover of, Keir Hardie, a Scotsman who rose from poverty to found the British Labor party. Except for Bertrand Russell, famous opponents are scarce because most supported the war. Hochschild vividly evokes the jingoism of even such leading men of letters as Kipling, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. By contrast, Hochschild paints equally vivid, painful portraits of now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading