The world of nihilistic terrorist conspiracy, paranoid empires and diplomatic opportunism
that Fromkin (In the Time of the Americans) describes in this terrific account of WWI's
underpinnings will seem eerily familiar to 21st-century denizens. Fromkin allies a direct,
compulsively readable style with a daunting command of sources old and new, unrolling
a complex skein of events with assurance and wit and dispatching numerous conventional
wisdoms. The view (most influentially stated in Barbara Tuchman's Vietnam-era Guns of
August), that the war, unwanted by all, was the result of an unfortunate series of
accidents, is neutralized by the clearly presented evidence of careful premeditation and
planning on the part of Germany and Austro-Hungary, as is the more recent assertion of
Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War that if only the rest of Europe had acceded to Germany's
imperial ambitions, the whole business might have been avoided. The enormity of the horrors
unleashed in that fateful summer.and the culpability of all sides in exacerbating them.has
made laying blame for the war squarely at the foot of the German and Austrian leadership
unfashionable, but the evidence assembled by Fromkin is strong. His pictures of a Germany
feeling itself (without real cause) surrounded, convinced of an imminent national demise
from which only war could save it and of the Kafkaesque Austro-Hungarian empire lurching
toward Armageddon are pitiless and sharp. Readers who ate up Margaret MacMillan's account
of the war's aftermath, in Paris 1919, shouldn't miss this equally accomplished chronicle
of its beginning.

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