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 enlarge | Author: G.j. Meyer
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.00
Buy New: $12.51
You Save: $8.49 (40%)
New (17) Used (9) from $11.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 39070
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 816
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0553382403
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.3
EAN: 9780553382402
ASIN: 0553382403
Publication Date: May 29, 2007
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Condition: Brand new Book, ALL days Low Price !
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| Customer Reviews:
 Some Variations On Common WWI Themes May 3, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Meyer's work is a good, eminently readable account of the Great War that is a relatively quick read. It avoids getting bogged down in the minutiae of military maneuvers. Unlike Barbara Tuchman's works, he focuses on a limited number of characters. You won't be searching Wikipedia for arcane names every-other-page.
Otherwise, Meyer's work doesn't offer much new to students of WWI. The villains are oft recognized from their appearances in previous accounts of the Great War. The Kaiser, Czar Nicholas II, Haig, Ludendorff, and Joffre make their obligatory appearances as either incompetents, or in the case of Ludendorff, a military genius but political failure. To Meyer, many of these personalities were well meaning, but overwhelmed by events and the enormity of modern warfare.
Where Meyer varies from common themes is seeming to place much of the blame for the immediate start of the war on the Austrians Conrad and Berchtold. Conrad broods for an opportunity to attack Serbia without appreciating enough the Russian threat. Berchtold supports Conrad for selfish, political reasons.
Meyer also apparently feels that peace "feelers" in the later years of the war were sincere and might have saved Germany from a Versailles style capitulation if Ludendorff hadn't so stubbornly clung to his no compromise position vis-a-vis Belgium and parts of occupied France.
For readers new to WWI, Meyer's work offers a well organized overview of events with logical explanations. "A World Undone" makes the complex history of 1914-1918 approachable.
Overlooked Gem April 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This should have gotten much more press when it was released. Probably the best one volume history the First World War.
Fantastic Read March 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book provided an excellent and relatively comprehensive history of WWI. Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of the Great War was limited to a few lessons dedicated to the conflict in a college military history course. As can be expected, my understanding of the war was by no means detailed. However, that has now changed. This excellent book offers a great explanation of the causes behind the war; thorough coverage of most major and 'minor' battles; and detailed discussion of the trends/developments that affected the future of the Continent as well as modern warfare. I truly enjoyed this book.
Only one minor complaint, the author should have included a few more maps throughout the body of the book. I continually had to refer to the maps in the front so I could keep all of the events straight. This was particularly true for the Eastern Front. However, this was a minor inconvenience that should not deter anyone from enjoying the book.
Breathtaking in the monumental stupidity behind this war... February 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
There are many writers out there who follow wars like they are creatures of good, of reason...like there is something glorious in going to war for the right reasons, for the right outcomes. Meyer exposes WWI for the fiasco it was, showing almost all countries and individuals responsible for creating this war as being reprehensible in their behaviours. The wanton destruction of life continues to be inexcusable, and in this book, all of the world-wide catastrophic loss of life, homes, and cultures are documented. Meyer does an excellent job of bringing together in one volume the important occurences that led up to the war, the battles, the personalities that made the decisions to continue the war, and how the war ultimately impacted culture throughout the world. Such a big event is hard to coalesce into one book, and as Meyer states, no one has attempted it before. But his writing and research is a big boon to readers who weary of trying to find a book that can explain all this.
Our world is nearly one hundred years removed from this war. We've had time to dwell on the mistakes made and the courage shown by all the young men on all fronts who were involved. The astronomical numbers of men sent to the front and used for cannon fodder on all sides just blows my mind away. Unfortunately, the same stupid reasoning and excuses are still at play in the wars in our current world. As George Santayana stated "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." We may not see the number of young men and civilians lost to the crimes of all wars seen in WWI, but they continue to harrow up the soul and make spirits mourn for potential not seen.
Karen L. Sadler
The "other" world war... February 18, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Before Hitler, Stalin, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, there was the "Great War"--the war to end all wars, World War 1. Diminished by time, by the characters and events of its even more horrific sequel, and the collective amnesia we inevitably suffer as a trauma--no matter how scarring--fades with time, World War 1 is largely forgotten and if its thought of at all, its often vaguely--a kind of faded relic symbolic of some bygone, simpler, and still idealistic age. When in fact World War 1 all but killed idealism outright in what was to that point four years of the most appalling and sustained slaughter in human history.
G.J. Meyer's *A World Undone* is a vivid reminder of how the Great War forever changed civilization--and how it very nearly destroyed it altogether. Some, in fact, would say that it did.
It's hard to imagine that a better one-volume history of World War 1 exists than this one. From the historical and political situation at the time of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist group to the signing of the Versailles Treaty which planted the poisoned seeds of World War 2, *A World Undone* provides the reader with a complete picture of the war--its causes, its battles, and its key personalities both in the trenches and behind the scenes.
Meyer's breathes life into his history and the war as he recounts it unfolds with all the pathos and drama of an epic novel--a tragedy in which everything that could possibly go wrong did and even those with the best of intentions seemed destined to make the most disastrous of choices. Of course, not everyone had the best of intentions. Here is the opportunistic jockeying of politicians and generals for fame and power as soldiers are butchered by the hundreds of thousands and civilian populations starve. Here is the stupidity and stubbornness that ordered an entire generation of young men straight into solid waves of machine gun fire because military strategy had yet to catch up with the new technology of death. Here is the nightmare of life in the elaborate networks of tunnels and trenches that soldiers shared with corpses, rats, and disease. Photographs embedded throughout the text help the reader put faces to the names of a large cast of characters and special "background" sections provide fascinating sidebar information and human interest pieces on everything from Lawrence of Arabia to the Ottoman Empire that entertain and illuminate.
Meyer wrote that his aim was to provide a World War 1 history that didn't assume the reader was already in possession of the historical currents converging in 1914 that made an assassin's pistol the starter's gun for a world war. Instead Meyer's intention was to take nothing for granted and to provide the reader with as complete and coherent picture as possible of a very complex time. In that he has succeeded without reservation. If you intend on reading only one book about the Great War, this would be the one book to read. Chances are, though, *A World Undone* will cause you to want to read further about the seminal disaster that inaugurates modern history--and whose aftershocks shake our still undone world today.
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