Obtain 14-18: Understanding The Great War Developed By Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau Viewable As Edition

world suffers from a collective amnesia, in which our vision is limited to trenches and flying aces, This book opens a dialogue on the atrocities committed by both sides, and the occupation that brutalized Belgium and France, which was as bad or worse than what they suffered in WWII.
No one considers the effect of the blockade on Germany, how their people too were starving, Propaganda paints it as a glorious, which this book puts the lie to, This is a good book on the general meaning of WWand on the historiography of the war how the story told by historians has changed over the years.
The broad question is really about how to understand why WWwas such a watershed and how it changed most everything that came after it.
This is not a book about battles, campaigns, and peoples, Readers who want such historical detail should read some of the many fine one volume histories that have come out prior to the centennial.
This book is more about broader questiolns like why the war was so violent and what that violence did to survivors, The book is actually composed of a number of shorter innterrelated essays on such topics as violence, compulsion and volunteerism, the nature of barbarity and propaganda, and the nature of the suffering that came with the war and has in many ways afflicted Europe ever since.
In its later chapters, the book reminds me of Drew Gilpin Faust's book about the US Civil War entitled "Republic of Suffering".


This is a shorter book but a thoughtful one, The authors have spent some time on these essays and the reader will need to do so as well to appreciate them.
It is a reissue of a book published just after the Millenium, but it reads very well and will reward patient readers.
The great battles of WWcan be read about elsewhere, It is also interesting to read a strong French perspective on the war and how it is currently understood in France, I enjoyed this book. It has some drawbacksthe authors use the book as a vehicle to suggest further research to other historians, Still, as a cultural history of WWI, it was a good read, Interesting consideration of the human cost beyond the battlefield in WWI, particularly the discussion of collective grief, A must read for the Great War historian!
I've read this book, and quote it many times while I was in the university.

It gives such an approach!is a social rather than a military or political history it examines how people thought about the Great War during the war itself, how the people it touched were changed by the war, and how the view of the war changed afterward as a result of those experiences.


It is a fascinating book which relies heavily on primary sources, More importantly, it looks at what people said during the war as well as what they said after the war, and examines the changes the differences between these attitudes indicate.
It takes time over the differences between the actual experiences of people affected by the war and the narrative of the war which eventually developed examining which experiences vanished from memory because they did not fit the narrative.


For instance, considerable time is spent on the experiences of French civilians in the occupied regions of France controlled by Germany for most of the war as they saw resources confiscated for the German war effort, and were in many cases deported or put into forced labor camps or roving labor units.
These experiences were little discussed in postwar France because they did not fit will with the memory of how France had sacrificed everything in order to hold the Germans back.
There was also increasing suspicion after the war of most accounts of German abuses or atrocities, as it became increasingly common to claim that these were virtually all fabricated by Allied propaganda.
Indeed, propaganda is one of the interesting issues covered, asshows fairly successfully that the term is not well applied to what went on in much of the Great War.
The modern use of the term refers to misinformation or biased information put forward by the government or a political faction in order to sway the people.
What exaggeration and hysteria did occur in the popular press during the first half of the war was, on the contrary, mostly a bottomup phenomenon.
It was only near the end of the war that what might in midcentury terms be called government "propaganda" began to be produced.


All of this makesa fascinating and important read, The reason I give it four rather than five relates mainly to scope and organization, The book is organized thematically, which is, I think, a good way to approach its subject, However, within each thematic section there is little effort to separate out the experiences of different countries and different theaters of war, though there is a good discussion of how trends changed during the course of the war.
I would have appreciated more discussion of the specific ways in which these experiences and trends varied by nation, What we get instead is mostly an account of France's experience, with a much more passing discussion of the British Empire and Germany mostly where their experiences were especially similar or in direct contrast.
Discussion of AustriaHungary and Italy are even more sketchy, and The US, Russia and Turkey almost absent, I could wish that the book either explicitly restricted itself to France and dug even deeper into that topic, or spent more time discussing each nation involved in the conflict separately within the themed chapters.
Goodreads win. Will read and review once received,

THis was an okay read, It was a little hard to get through because of the writing style, Not something I am really into and the book didn't help out

any, I will admit at times the book got my attention, One thing I did enjoy about the book is how well the author knew the facts, I haven't read French academic work before besides a handful of economics articles in school and now I'm wondering why I haven't because this book was very readable.
I have read a lot of German academic works and they are a bear to slog through really long convoluted sentences better writing in Germany so that's what I was expecting.
If you're looking for a military history or a look at the actual physical movement of the war look elsewhere,looks at the psychological impact of the war across a variety of populations during and after the war, It's broken intosections dealing with violence, the cognitive framework of the war, and mourning, Overall and readable look at the social impact of the First World War,

I receive a free copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway, all opinions are my own, This book challenges and explains what the Great War was like culturally for those fighting and those not fighting, Moving. This book really explains the formation of the Red Cross, religion/spirituality and its development, as well as what the war was like for women and children.
It also poses the question why is WWI often overlooked in favor of WWII, when it was equally ugly, .