The Krupp family were the premier German arms manufacturers from the middle of the 19th century until the end of World War II, producing artillery pieces and submarines that set the standard for effectiveness. This book relates the history of this influential company.
The Unsubstantial Air is the gripping story of the Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War I. Much more than a traditional military history, it is an account of the excitement of becoming a pilot and flying in combat over the Western Front, told through the words and voices of the aviators themselves.
A World War II pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes revives the ad-venturous young men who inspired his own generation to take to the sky. The volunteer fliers were often privileged-the sorts of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and sometimes did. Others were country boys from the farms and ranches of the West. Hynes follows them from the flying clubs of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale and the grass airfields of Texas and Canada to training grounds in Europe and on to the front, where they learned how to fight a war in the air. And to the bars and clubs of Paris and London, where they unwound and discovered another kind of excitement, another challenge. He shows how East Coast aristocrats like Teddy Roosevelt's son Quentin and Arizona roughnecks like Frank Luke the Balloon Buster all dreamed of chivalric single combat in the sky, and how they came to know both the beauty of flight and the constant presence of death.
By drawing on letters sent home, diaries kept, and memoirs published in the years that followed, Hynes brings to life the emotions, anxieties, and triumphs of the young pilots. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open- air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, rest at Voltaire's castle, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that-a harsh but often thrilling reality. Weaving together their testimonies, The Unsubstantial Air is a moving portrait of a generation coming of age under new and extreme circumstances.
This is the kind of investigatory history Hochschild pulls off like no one else . . . Hochschild is a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it's challenged. -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
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 history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's 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 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. As Adam Hochschild brings the Great War to life as never before, he forces us to confront the big questions: Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldn't cooler heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history? Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story and explores it in provocative ways . . . Exemplary in all respects. -- Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Superb . . . Brilliantly written and reads like a novel . . . Hochschild] gives us yet another absorbing chronicle of the redeeming power of protest. -- Minneapolis Star Tribune
Based on previously unused French and German sources, this challenging and controversial new analysis of the war on the Western front from 1914 to 1918 reveals how and why the Germans won the major battles with one-half to one-third fewer casualties than the Allies, and how American troops in 1918 saved the Allies from defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it surprised a European population enjoying the most beautiful summer in memory. For nearly a century since, historians have debated the causes of the war. Some have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; others have concluded it was unavoidable.
In Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin provides a different answer: hostilities were commenced deliberately. In a riveting re-creation of the run-up to war, Fromkin shows how German generals, seeing war as inevitable, manipulated events to precipitate a conflict waged on their own terms. Moving deftly between diplomats, generals, and rulers across Europe, he makes the complex diplomatic negotiations accessible and immediate. Examining the actions of individuals amid larger historical forces, this is a gripping historical narrative and a dramatic reassessment of a key moment in the twentieth-century.This book unravels the complicated and tragic events of the Eastern Front in the First World War. The author details Russia's sudden attack on German forces, despite her inadequate resources. A crushing defeat at Tannenberg was followed by Germany inflicting humiliation after humiliation on desperate Russian troops. For a while, those forces led by General Brusilov and facing Austria-Hungary fared better, but in the end this front too collapsed. Morale plummeted, the army began to disintegrate, and the Tsar was forced to abdicate - paving the way for the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.
A thirty-two volume boxed set, The Makers of the Modern World is a monumental look at all the signatories of the Versailles treaty.
Slight shelf wear to some of the dust jackets; else pristine and unread. Photos on request.
This is a fascinating account of two very different Anzac experiences of World War I. Drawing on letters, diaries, and photographs from his grandfather and great-uncle, Greg Kerr relates the bitter experiences of Hedley Kerr (killed at Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915) and George Kitchin Kerr, who was wounded at Gallipoli and later survived three years in a Turkish prison camp.
The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August, and The Zimmerman Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman's classic histories of the First World War era
During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was "heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate." In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev's Russian ballet and Stravinsky's music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaur s on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. Praise for The Proud Tower " Barbara W. Tuchman's] Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August was an expert evocation of the first spasm of the 1914-1918 war. She brings the same narrative gifts and panoramic camera eye to her portrait of the antebellum world."--Newsweek"A rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish . . . It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration."--The New York Times "An exquisitely written and thoroughly engrossing work . . . The author's knowledge and skill are so impressive that they whet the appetite for more."--Chicago Tribune " Tuchman] tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding."--Time
