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    Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914
    Unavailable
    Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914
    Unavailable
    Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914
    Audiobook28 hours

    Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

    Written by Max Hastings

    Narrated by Max Hastings and NIgel Carrington

    5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war.

    1914: a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, Imperial Europe was thrown into its first modernised warfare and white-gloved soldiers rode in their masses across pastoral landscapes into the blaze of machine–guns. What followed were the costliest days of the entire War. But how had it happened?

    In Catastrophe: 1914 Max Hastings, best-selling author of the acclaimed All Hell Let Loose, answers at last how World War I could ever have begun. Ranging across Europe, from Paris to St. Petersberg, from Kings to corporals, Catastrophe 1914 traces how tensions across the continent kindled into a blaze of battles; not the stalemates of later trench-warfare but battles of movement and dash where Napoleonic tactics met with weapons from a newly industrialised age. A searing analysis of the power-brokering, vanity and bluff in the diplomatic maelstrom reveals who was responsible for the birth of this catastrophic world in arms. Mingling the experiences of humbler folk with the statesmen on whom their lives depended, Hastings asks: whose actions were justified?

    From the out-break of war through to its terrible making, and the bloody gambles in Sarajevo and Mons, Le Cateau, Marne and Tannenberg, this is the international story of World War I in its most severe and influential period. Published to coincide with its 100th Anniversary, Catastrophe: 1914 explains how and why this war, which shattered and changed the Western world for ever, was fought.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 29, 2015
    ISBN9780008168568
    Unavailable
    Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914
    Author

    Max Hastings

    Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

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    Reviews for Catastrophe

    5/5

    13 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent, thought provoking piece of work very enlightening about the eastern front. Also a view of the BEF and it's leadership much different than l remember from the pages of the Victor.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A truly brilliant book about World War I. As is the usual with Hastings' work, it's deeply moving and informative at the same time - showcasing the broader strategic conflict as well as the plight of individual men trapped within it. Highly recommended!
    • 5/5
      Excellent book. It focuses less on the battlefield and more on the general setting of the war. People, social dynamics, the effects of the conflict on the soldiers and citizens of the nations involved in the. The thesis is that the Western Front is the most important of the main war theatres. Almost no attention whatsoever is given to the African and Asian theatres. No mention is made to the effects of the war in the Americas (mainly Canada, Mexico and Brazil). That allows the author to develop the effects of the war in-depth on the European society
    • 5/5
      Great book. I would have also liked more emphasis on the French - German struggle, which, on my view, was the more important during the first year of the war