World's End

Lanny Budd #1

by Upton Sinclair

World's End is the first novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1940, the story covers the period from 1913 to 1919. This is the beginning of a monumental 7,340 page novel, the story of Lanny Budd, a young American, beginning in Europe in 1913. It is also an intimate record of a great world which fell victim to its own civilization. A new world was about to be born.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Classics, Historical, Literature, 20th Century, War

740 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1940

About the author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first installment in Sinclair's "Lanny Budd" series. It's excellent historical fiction that is thoroughly researched and offers an insight to American history you're not going to get in school. The series begins in the early 1900s when Lanny is a young teen and follows his life in Europe leading up to and through WWI. He lands a role in the peace process and Lanny's description of world events is incisive.

But what is really amazing is the revelation that what the world was fighting over in WWI is exactly what we're fighting over now - Middle East oil. And the motives and players haven't changed.

These books are really long, but really good.

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Habia leido La Jungla anteriormente de Upton Sinclair, y aunque es magnifico, no tiene nada que ver con esta serie de Lanny Budd. El fin del Mundo es casi un libro de aventuras, de esos que no puedes dejar de leer, que estás deseando retomarlo estés donde estés, una historia vital y entretenidísima y Lanny es un personaje maravilloso. Muy invisible en nuestro país Upton Sinclair, quizás por lo que decía más arriba y la gente se piense que se puede parecer a La Jungla, que es casi la obra más conocida de Sinclair, y sin embargo, estoy segura de que cualquier acercamiento del lector a Lanny Budd ya es para siempre. Gracias a Hoja de Lata por darle visibilidad, aunque necesita ser todavía más conocido!!

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the beginning of a long journey. The series consists of 11 novels in all and covers the time period from 1913 to 1949. I think there are no short novels in it, but I do hope to read them all. This first installment takes us through the first world war and ends when the peace agreement is signed, June 28, 1919.

Lanny Budd was born at the turn of the century, so it's easy to tell in which year the action takes place, as it is the same as his age. As a character he is real enough. However, it was not believable to me that Lanny is in the right place at the right time to see and experience all that he does, especially given his youth in this novel. Still, I think Sinclair found an interesting vehicle to write his historical fiction of this long and tumultuous period.

There are no gripping scenes where I worried about one character or another. I've read a lot about World War I. Here there was an aspect of the injured recuperating that was different. For me, the most fascinating portion was the last 1/4 or so when Sinclair provides his insight into the Peace Conference. It made me want to read Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. Sinclair didn't think much of the various personalities who were divvying up the world, but I also expect that all of the greed and infighting was probably near accurate.

Sinclair himself was a socialist. I think he does well that his personal beliefs aren't more prominent, but I would be lying if I said they aren't there at all. It's clear that he has a low opinion of capitalism, though he tries very hard to be balanced. I read this through my own knowledge that socialism is a failed economic system, but also that pure capitalism gives rise to revolution. The swings in governance are not the healthiest for society.

The period covered in this novel saw the Russian Revolution, and I learned it affected the west immediately after the war that was new to me. (Was I asleep in history class or did they just skip that?) As the series continues, I'll be interested to learn what Sinclair has to say about Stalin, or if, given his own political views, he chooses to ignore Soviet totalitarianism.

This is good, but not 5-stars good. I look forward to the next installment.

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful first book of this 11 volume series about Lanny Budd. Budd is the son of a Connecticut munitions manufacturing family, but lives his first 13 years of life with his mother in the Cote d'Azur of France. He sees his father sporadically when he comes to Europe on business but for the most part he is with his mother whose name is Beauty (I kid you not, but there is a long backstory to this). He eventually goes to Germany to learn the Eurythmic style of dancing and meets and makes friends with one boy from Germany and one from England (whom I assume will be fixtures in the future books). The time period in the book in 1913 thru 1919, and we eventually see Lanny going to CT to meet his American family and then returning to Europe where he stumbles into a position as part of the Paris Peace Conference which led to the Treaty of Versailles. I was captivated by the writing and the book. Sinclair was a Socialist and you can see that point of view coming through during the last half of the book when everything basically focused on the diplomats and the way they carved up the world. Personally I thought that Conference and Treaty was horrible and much of that was the fault of Woodrow Wilson and brought a religious conviction that to solve the worlds problems it was his way or the highway, and unfortunately Wilson was not really a world scholar and had no idea what he was talking about on many issues. Every country was a fault for this, and we see Lanny in the midst of all of this and even see his point of view change dramatically during the book.
It is a fine effort, and written more than 20 years after the events of the book, Sinclair is able to add some perspective and prejudice to these events. It is very heavy on the history part in the the last half of the book, but it is fascinating to see all the machinations that went on in Paris and all the players who were involved. This series was lost for years and thankfully was rediscovered and put in eBook form.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am enjoying this so much, I just went and bought the next three of this very long series. Each and every book is very long, an d this pleases me to a T! Bronson Pinchot narrates wonderfully.

In this the first book, three friends, teenagers born right before the turn of the 20th century, are great characters. Through them we compare different nationalities and cultures. We view American, English, German and French ways of behaving. The depiction is spot-on and told with goth wisdom and humor. Having lived in both the USA and Europe, I am given much ro think about and chuckle over. Historical facts are woven into the telling in an engaging manner. WW1 is currently on progress.

Excellent coverage of WW1!

I'm immediately reading the next of the series!

*********************

*The Jungle 3 stars

the Lanny Budd Series:
1. World's End 4 stars
2.Between Two Worlds TBR
3.Dragon's Teeth TBR
4.Wide Is the Gate TBR
more follow

[Austen to Zafón]

Why: This is the first in a series of several books about Lanny Budd, the third of which (Dragon's Teeth) won the Pulitzer in 1943. It has been out of print for years, but is finally back from a small publisher. The edition I saw on Amazon didn't look too pretty, so I'll probably look for a used hardcover. Now that there is a movie (There Will Be Blood) based loosely on Sinclair's novel Oil!, I hope there will be a resurgence of interest in this left-wing, socialist-minded novelist. Here is what the publisher had to say (edited down somewhat):

While this novel is fictional, it is probably one of the best historical views of the 20th Century. At the same time it is extremely funny. The story is applicable to the present day and the foreseeable future in that it politically targets the desire of the West to control oil flow. It starts during the years of pre-WW I and continues through to WW II. It will give the reader a greater understanding of the world events during that period of time. As said in a review, the character of "Larry Budd is extraordinary and realistically portrayed with true emotion and depth". Upton Sincalir left us a truly vivid perspective of the world at this point in history.

[Carolpalanques · Rating 4 out of 5]

Menudo descubrimiento!!!! Este es el primer libro protagonizado por Lanny Budd un personaje de ficción que vive sucesos históricos muy reales en primera persona. En esta primera entrega de la saga he conocido y comprendido por fin la primera guerra mundial de la mano de este joven americano afincado en la Riviera Francesa. Las verdaderas razones que llevaron a los hombres a uno de los mayores sinsentido del sXX , las estrategias de unos y otros, las alianzas entre países, el planteamiento y carácter de los dirigentes del mundo en esos días, los sentimientos de los hombres enviados a morir, el amor en tiempos de guerra, la lucha de clases.... con los Budd y sus amistades he podido vivir en la Europa de principios del siglo pasado y ha sido toda una experiencia, tanto que estoy deseando leer el siguiente de la saga y acompañar a Lanny Budd por los maravillosos años 20. Para todos los amantes de la historia, de las aventuras y de los diferentes puntos de vista para explicar un mismo hecho Lanny Budd es vuestro guía del sXX. Leedlo os va a encantar 😉

[Tabuyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aunque me ha encantado la forma de escribir Upton Sinclair y la trama personal de los personajes, el hecho de haber tanta política y diplomacia me hizo bastante cuesta arriba la lectura.

Aunque no es denso se me hizo pesado en unas cuantas ocasiones por tratar temas políticos, de alianzas y de la venta de armamento por parte del padre de Lanny.

Una pena porque lo que es la historia personal de los personajes me estaba encantando, sobre todo la de su madre.

[Antonio Luis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me parece loable el intento, o el logro visto el resultado, de recreación histórica, aunque a mí no ha conseguido fascinarme, probablemente porque he coincidido con muchas lecturas al mismo tiempo y ésta ha quedado un poco relegada mientras disfrutaba más de otras (Tiffany McDaniel, Tan Tawn Eng, Maggie O'Farrell, o David Uclés), que aportaban un tono muy lírico a historias crudas, tono que he echado en falta en Upton Sinclair.
Sólo después de la mitad he ido conectando algo más con la narración, hacia la paz tras la primera guerra mundial. Al principio los personajes me parecían muy remilgados y su contexto muy forzado para servir a los intereses de la historia, aunque después me ha ido resultando más creible, y ha terminado pareciéndome acertado.

[Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is just plain good writing. An enjoyable story about a kid growing up with diverse influences. He learns to question everyone and to never say too much.

You can enjoy the pleasantly simple story while absorbing the moral message re the intricate complex undercurrent of global business, and learn a little history too. I wish I would have read this a long time ago.

I think everyone would like to think of themselves as been as open-minded and thoughtful as Lanny Budd. This is likely why I am so attracted to this storyline.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the last month or so I spent my reading time in the rarefied world of Lanny Budd, the main character of Upton Sinclair's book World's End. The 599 page book (yes it was long) is the first of an eleven-book series with over 7,000 pages. The story begins when Lanny is an eleven-year-old boy and concludes when he is 19 - in 1919 at the end of World War I. Lanny is the son of a wealthy American arms dealer, but grows up with his mother, Beauty, on the Riviera (his parents never married) among the rich and well connected. The book is a means of relating the history of the time and the road leading up to the first world war and it aftermath. Lanny has a front row seat to the drafting the peace treaty at the end of the war in Paris when he becomes a secretary to one of President Woodrow Wilson's advisors. This last part got rather long and tedious at times.

I enjoyed the book on the whole. The writing is rather old fashioned with a distant third person narrator relating events. What I found most interesting is how much our world problems today are rooted in the World War I treaty, which divided up the world, including the middle east, to benefit the European countries and America by giving them control over oil/gas and other resources. Even thought I did know this basically, it was fascinating to learn about the bargaining and machinations of the treaty process that left the world not a better place. The treaty led directly to World War II with grave consequences into the future.

[Michele Hadlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first of eleven books from the World's End series, also known as the Lanny Budd books. By far my favorite books of all time.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of a series of books. This particular book mostly covers just before until just after World War I. The main character is a young man. He is American, who was born in France, who lives with his mother and his visited by his father occasionally. His father sells weapons, mostly to Europeans. This is especially notable because of World War I. This young man runs into a number of improbable situations so that he can be in the midst of a number of historic situations, including the post World War I Peace council in Paris, following the war, where the surrender of Germany was formalized.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have yet to be disappointed by a novel from Upton Sinclair, whose work spans the first six decades of the early 20th century. By the time he began this Lanny Budd novel in 1940 -- the first of an eventual eleven-novel series totaling over 7,000 pages that would chronicle Lanny’s life between 1913 and 1950 -- Sinclair was among a handful of major socialist novelists remaining in the United States.

World’s End lacks the fire and sense of immediacy of Sinclair’s early work -- The Jungle, King Coal, Oil!, etc. -- but that’s because its goal is not to engage in muckraking a current social ill, but to trace the course of America’s rise to industrial power in the early 20th century. Lanny (born in 1900) is obviously a character symbolic of the U.S. industrial class as it comes of age between two world wars. We see his early education among the privileged in Europe, as he doesn’t even set foot in the U.S. until he is 17. There is a section where he discovers the infamous slums of East London (which is clearly a nod to socialist classics like Jack London’s The People of the Abyss and Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier ) and is first introduced to the aims of socialism that are so antithetical to his family’s war profiteering empire, emphasizing that Lanny’s story is a microcosm of the U.S. at the turn-of-the-century.

The grandson of a munitions baron, Lanny learns that the impending war has more to do with capitalism than democracy: money, oil, and post-war power. His American family (i.e., the U.S.) sells weapons to any buyer. Since the U.K. and France have more money than Germany, the U.S. sells weapons to them (while remaining “neutral” *ahem*), but ultimately joins the war, naturally allying with the countries who buy the most weapons, and who put the U.S. in the best position to have access to oil in the post-war division of spoils. Sinclair is writing in 1940, so he makes very clear the link between capitalism and fascism that would come to a head in Spain and Germany in the 1930s, the seeds of which were sown in the First World War. Lanny’s grandfather, despite manufacturing and selling the arms that will kill millions, preaches fundamental Christian dogma and leads the local Bible study on his days off from negotiating weapons contracts with warring nations. (As P.F. Sloan would write 25 years later of American cultural values: “Hate your next door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace…”)

The novel is unique from other American WWI novels (Cather’s One of Ours, Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, etc.) in that the action moves WEST across the Atlantic: it begins in Europe and only then transitions to the U.S. when the war begins. Sinclair is offering the perspective not of the working poor who are tricked into joining the war for the illusory ideal of “making the world safe for democracy,” but of the upper classes who fund the war and make the profits, all from the security of their mansions. As the heir of a wealthy industrialist family, Lanny has the opposite experience of poor American working class men who are raised in the States before being shipped off as canon fodder in Europe: he lives a life of privilege in France, only to flee to the safety of Connecticut while America enters the war. Only after the war does Lanny return as a secretary to a member of Wilson’s delegation as The Big Three attempt to remake the world -- leading to the complications that would not be straightened out until the Second World War.

It is this second half of the book that is the most fascinating, as Sinclair charts both Lanny’s gradual drift to socialism and the political machinations that would continue to play out on the world stage through the Cold War and beyond. The U.S. and France both attempt to deal with Germany in their own way (feeling sympathy and punishing, respectively), while hypocritically advocating for post-war “self determination” while simultaneously ruling over world empires along with the U.K. The scene is set for Lanny’s young adulthood, America’s rapid ascendency in the world, and eventually the rise of fascism in Europe before WWII.

I look forward to following Budd’s journey in the next ten books of the series. Each one is 600-800 pages long, and Sinclair intended these to be one massive 7,000+ page novel, so I imagine it will take me a few years to get through. It’s easy to see why this would lead Sinclair to receive the Pulitzer for the third novel in the series, Dragon's Teeth, in 1942.

[Víctor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se me ha hecho un poco largo, pero me ha gustado descubrir la historia de la primera guerra mundial a través del bueno y joven de Lanny Budd. El autor le da un enfoque tan realista que permite vivir y sentir de cerca aquellos acontecimientos. Ayudando a comprender, a quien no lo sepa todavía, cuales son las motivaciones de las guerras... y de las paces! Agradable lectura.

[Lila Gloria Fernández de Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adore este libro. Me fascino el personaje principal y vives con el su niñez, y despues su adolescencia. Los personajes bien desarrollados. Los antecedentes historicos muy bien comentados. Estoy deseando seguir con el siguiente volumen.

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an exciting glimpse into the events that led to WWI, its duration and immediate aftermath. The book is long and it reads like it was initially a serial (though i don't think it was?)...a series of quandaries and dire straits which are resolved within a chapter or two but meanwhile a couple new ones have been introduced. So, as a reader, you can just keep barreling along as long as you wish. And in fact the end of the book is much the same, in that only some things are resolved, others are left cliffhung, and the first bit of the next in the series is included at the end of the ebook.

It's got some earmarks of books written in the 1940s--racist/sexist slurs from some of the characters, no main characters of color, heavily coded LGBT characters which you wouldn't see if you weren't wise to the coded clues, etc. But wow, it's also just like being right there, the immediacy of the writing is immersive. I'll keep reading this series for sure, and in fact it would probably make good TV show fodder for one of these long-run Netflix or Showtime series.

[Alex Stinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting, compelling read. Appreciate it for what it is: an excellent well written coming of age novel witnessing the events surrounding World War I in france.

[Dawn Dorsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must confess this is the first Upton Sinclair I have read, but it will not be the last. Although Sinclair's socialist views are clear, he also addresses other points of view through his characters, and tries to understand and explain how various parties arrive at their different social biases. The writing is marvelous.

The primary protagonist, Lanny Budd, is so situated in life as to have a front-seat view onto history (novels are such a convenient vehicle), and we experience the build-up to the First World War through his eyes, as an expatriate American who has grown up on the Côte d'Azur, and is comfortable in French salons, English country houses, and German castles alike, with leisure classes, landed gentry, peasants and servants. Through Lanny and his friends, starting when he was thirteen in 1913, we see how so many people managed to deny the oncoming war until it was actually declared, and how they lived or died through it, in France primarily, and peripherally in England, Germany, and America. Sinclair also shows how, concurrent with this Great War, the working class rebellions worldwide were reaching the boiling point, and the Russian Bolsheviks were the noisiest, but far from the only ones fighting their own wars within the Great War, and wanted to take over every country as they did Russia.

Lanny, at nineteen, was also involved in the long drawn-out peace negotiations, and thereby able to give his readers a window into the squabbles and demands of the various parties which finally resulted in such a punitive treaty as to guarantee the next war, even while progressive dreamers like Woodrow Wilson thought they were saving the world with such a treaty, and its new League of Nations. Some of the characters saw clearly that the Treaty of Versailles did little more than set up the next war, and that many of its parties were already fighting it.

This book was first published in 1940, by which time once again the world was at war, and it must have been very difficult to see how it would end. Sinclair had hindsight, but not a very long view, to see how the world had changed with that first great upheaval.

[Nico Beukema · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meer dan vijftig jaar zag ik de Lanny Bud-reeks op de boekenplank van mijn ouders staan. Nu wordt die boekenplank ontruimd en is de reeks in mijn bezit gekomen. Deel 1 heb ik nu gelezen. Deze speelt in de periode 1913 tot 1919, een tijd die mij altijd bijzonder interesseert. Het perspectief op deze tijd door de ogen van een opgroeiende puber is anders dan de eerdere boeken die ik hierover heb gelezen. Het leest als een avontuur waarin alle hoofdrolspelers van deze tijd figureren. Het gedeelte over de totstandkoming van het Verdrag van Versailles vond ik een boeiend inkijkje. Evenals de dan al algemeen aanvaarde conclusie dat het verdrag geen vredesverdrag was, maar de prelude voor een nieuwe oorlog. Over de prelude en oorlog gaan de nog komende 10 delen. Ik ben benieuwd.

[♪ Kim N · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visit Unshelfish for more reviews & giveaways

Sinclair dishes out a huge chunk of history in this book, his layout is appealing and it describes more than any textbook. His vehicle to highlight events is the endearing protagonist Lanny Budd. Lanny is 14 years old in 1914 and as the story and events unfold Lanny becomes even more appealing as he enters adulthood through a trying time in history.

Lanny’s character is dramatized by his presence in nearly every major event or has the privilege meeting every notable figure of the time, however, this does not detract but rather creates a fascinating narrative with mystery, suspense, thrills. You can’t help but find yourself taken by Lanny.

If you’re interested in history but avoid nonfiction, you will completely enjoy Sinclair’s historical fiction masterpiece with the nonfiction well presented and researched. Not many know the real issue WWI was centered around – it was more than the assassination of Archduke Ferdindad, much more as traditional classroom textbooks fail to mention. Sinclair offers the opportunity to enjoy history in an easy to read manner through the eyes of impressive Lanny Budd. A wonderful prelude in an 11 book series.

Sinclair’s story is told from the Socialist perspective which adds an interesting spin creating an enthralling read.

[Raime · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unexpectedly competent prose for such a long novel in a series of 11 huge tomes written in such a short time. Last third brings the book somewhat down, because of all the historical backdrops that get in a way of the actual narrative.

"Lanny’s mother, flitting through life like a butterfly over a flower bed, was so charming and so gay that few would ever note how little honey she gathered."

"England would follow her usual rule of losing every battle but the last."

"Women would smile behind their fans, and whisper; but after all there has to be a statute of limitations on scandals."

"A young man wanted to get into “prep school” as quickly as possible, in order that he might get through “prep school” as quickly as possible, in order that he might get into college as quickly as possible, in order that he might get out of college as quickly as possible."

"We have won a victory over the German people and we have now to win the German people to that victory."

[Darcy Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

As much as I was excited about finding a new-to-me high-quality historical series, this book was a slog. The widespread reader comment that Sinclair used Lanny Budd as a historical vehicle a la Forrest Gump more than a fully developed character is right on. It's true that Sinclair covers an enormous amount of Treaty of Versailles political history in a way that would have been very difficult without placing Lanny conveniently at the center of, well, everything. What most interested me is that these events occurred less than a decade before Sinclair wrote about them. I also was intrigued by his frank--for the time--portrayal and discussion of sex. Of course, it's extremely tame by contemporary standards. Not sure I'll give Lanny another go, though.

[Alethea Hammer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is considered historical fiction but at the time it was written it was mostly contemporary, at least, in the sense that Sinclair was writing about history that was contemporary to his life. Of course he had to do a lot of research about the Paris Peace Conference and the arms business. I enjoyed the book very much and I felt its only flaw comes from Upton Sinclair's innate ideological preachiness. Otherwise, I totally loved it.

[Mark W. Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book in the Lanny Budd series. This book shows how Lanny developed his political ideas. Great history about the political events concerning WW1. I have read this book 2 or 3 times in the past and am reading through the whole series again.

[Fae Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me want to read more of the Lanny Budd series.

[Robert Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I finish number 11, I'll reread 1,2,and 3 to see all that I missed. The best series ever.

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the beginning of a series of books, about the world with Europe centre stage with time spanning from end of world war I to cold war.

A young boy who is coming of age as the first war, then called the great war, is ending, and he happens to be in place where he can be useful as an interpreter - his father is from a US family with a gun manufacture business, and the mother - Beauty Budd, Budd being the name of the family that no one can be sure she legally does have a right to, but most find it more convenient not to challenge her on the point - living in southern coastal France is from US too, a beauty and an ex-model who worked with artists including her own brother in Paris before having a son.

Lanny Budd is growing up with Riviera for home and Europe for a playground, and the education he receives from various sources - his New England austere and wealthy Budd family, his mother with her genial and loving, kind and compassionate character and her coterie of friends who are wealthy and of upper class; his friends from England and Germany, whom he has mutual visits with, and his extended family with various half brothers and sisters, is all giving him a base from which he grows to be a man of education and learning and a good conscience and a good heart. He is the protagonist and in some sense the soul of the world he inhabits where much is to happen - and the future of humanity is at stake.

This is the first volume of the series that has ten volumes or eleven in all - I always forget the number but do wish one day to have them to read again. It was fortunate to stumble across them in the first place, in a library that was a refuge and a retreat all those years, and incidentally is now a landmark and a preserved heritage structure.
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The World's End series, of eleven books that span the history of the era from the WWI to the cold war with its stage expanding from Europe to cover much of the globe, begins with this first title, the book titled World's End; and the ominous title notwithstanding, the book begins completely steeped in the leisurely beauty of a Europe that had no clue it was perilously at edge of an era it was going to be thrown headlong into, with wars, revolutions, massacres and genocides forming only a few of the horrors, millions losing lives and much more. To give a clue to someone more familiar with TV and films, think the opening scene of the first episode, first series, of Downton Abbey - not to mean that literally of course, but in spirit.

Europe, most of it anyway, was at peace in 1913 and the author describes it so superbly, reading it for only the second time one is enchanted all over again.

The first time was over four decades ago, just after finishing a second degree at another university and finishing reading plays of George Bernard Shaw, and looking forward to another beginning again, a beginning of a serious career choice. Perfect time to immerse oneself in this, then a serendipitous find in - the now heritage - David Sasson Librarywhere we were - and I still am - life members.

At that young age, it was the perfect time indeed to get to know the world and the recent history, through the eyes and writing of this author who presented truths and horrors without putting beauty and love aside, and was real without cynicism.

Reading it again, about the young teen who is looking forward to much, to everything, of life and world, one has the author say at the end of second chapter:-

"What was the use of thinking about religion and self-dedication and all that, if men were shrimps and crabs, and nations were sharks and octopi? Here was a problem which men had been debating before Lanny Budd was born and which it would take him some time to settle!"

And despite knowing the whole series, the beauty of writing of this author has one almost wonder if one ought to hold oneself back from indulging in the pleasure!
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Having meanwhile read several, but not finished yet the most famous, works of William Shirer, its all the more evident there is a deep connection between the two writers of seemingly very different genre - Upton Sinclair's prose borders on poetry in all but rhyme, and William Shirer seems to act and think so very like Lanny Budd the protagonist of this series as he writes about the same era, that one has to wonder, did they ever meet? Perhaps not, and perhaps it's a deeper connection of spirit that needs no meeting of persons in physical terms, or even of them having any correspondence.
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One of the delights of this series is that while the characters in front stage, so to speak, mostly are recognisable prototypes, and some of them at centre ideals, famous names of the era are woven into the story via encounters and relationships with those in forefront, and these are from most areas of life, from politics of every sort to artists, businessmen and society, literature and more.

Early on Lanny meets Barbara Pugliese, and it's a very moving description, of the woman who chose to live amonst poor and is emaciated. Later in this volume, after WWI as Lanny is a secretsry at the peace conference, Lanny meets Lawrence with Emir Feudal, and a page by the author sums up Lawrence of Arabia. Later volumes of course have almost everyone worth naming!
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Lanny being told about British treaty with France denied in British parliament:-

"“That has been denied in the British Parliament,” Robbie declared, “but the British diplomat’s definition of a lie is an untrue statement made to a person who has a right to know the truth. Needless to say, there aren’t many such persons!”

Later, after Manny has discovered East End and also the dire poverty in Berkshire for tenants, he's discussing it with Robbie, who finds British poverty disgusting.

"Robbie had been in business competition with the English, which was different from being a guest in their well-conducted homes. “They are sharp traders,” he said, “and that’s all right, but what gets your goat is the mask of righteousness they put on; nobody else sells armaments for the love of Jesus Christ.” The Empire, he added, was run by a little group of insiders in “the City”—the financial district. “There are no harder-fisted traders anywhere; power for themselves is what they are out for, and they’ll destroy the rest of the world to get and keep it.”"

And about graft in politics:-

"In our country when the political bosses want to fill their campaign chest, they put up some rich man for a high office—a ‘fat cat’ they call him—and he pays the bills and gets elected for a term of years. In England the man pays a much bigger sum into the party campaign chest, and he’s made a marquess or a lord, and he and his descendants will govern the Empire forever after—but that isn’t corruption, that’s ‘nobility’!” ... On the board of Vickers are four marquesses and dukes, twenty knights, and fifty viscounts and barons. The Empire will do exactly what they say—and there won’t be any ‘graft’ involved.”"

When Europe is on brink of war, they meet a French journalist in Paris.

"“The German ambassador pleaded with friends of mine at the Quai d’Orsay. ‘There is and should be no need for two highly civilized nations to engage in strife. Russia is a barbarous state, a Tatar empire, essentially Asiatic.’ So they argue. They would prefer to devour us at a second meal,” added the Frenchman, his black eyes shining."
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The author uses a neat device, in setting the not entirely historical characters representing characteristics national and political, and Lanny has an upper class British nobility friend and a German one whose father is in charge in castle Stubendorf in Silesia.

"Rick hadn’t been as much impressed by Kurt’s long words as had Lanny, and he said that anyhow, what was the use of fancy-sounding philosophy if you didn’t make it count in everyday affairs? Rick said furthermore that from now on America’s safety depended on the British fleet, and the quicker the Americans realized it the better for them and for the world."

The description comes early, but is an apt and succinct one for most of WWII:-

"Winter was coming now. In Flanders and through northern France a million men were lying out in the open, in trenches and shell holes half full of filthy water which froze at night. They were devoured by vermin and half paralyzed by cold, eating bread and canned meat, when it could be brought to them over roads which had been turned into quagmires. All day and night bullets whistled above them and shells came down out of the sky, blowing bodies to fragments and burying others under loads of mud. The wounded had to lie where they fell until death released them, or night made it possible for their fellows to drag them back into the trenches."

"The military deadlock at the front continued. All winter long the Allies had spent their forces trying to take trenches defended by machine guns—a weapon of which the Germans had managed to get the biggest supply. It was something that Robbie Budd had helped to teach them—and which he had tried in vain to teach the French and British. He couldn’t write freely about it now, but there were hints in his letters, and Lanny knew what they meant, having been so often entertained by his father’s comic portrayals of the British War Office officials with whom he had been trying to do business. So haughty they were, so ineffable, almost godlike in their self-satisfaction—and so dumb! No vulgar American could tell them anything; and now dapper young officers strolled out in front of their troops, waving their swagger sticks, and the German sharpshooters knocked them over like partridges off tree limbs. It was sublime, but it wasn’t going to win this war of machines."

Here's something not often publicised:-

"The British had failed in their efforts to take the Dardanelles, largely because they couldn’t decide whether the taking was worth the cost. Now they were starting an advance from Salonika, a harbor in the north of Greece. That country had a pro-German king, ..."

The said King of Greece at the time was a brother of the two dowager queens, Queen Alexandra of England her sister Dagmar the mother of the last Tsar, Nicholas. What's more, his son Prince Andrew was married to Princess Alice of Hesse, a great granddaughter of Queen Victoria through her daughter Princess Alice, and his grandson Prince Philip is the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II of England. Besides, while England and Russia had closer ties with German royals and especially with Kaiser Wilhelm who was another grandson of Queen Victoria, the then king of Greece did not, not anywhere near his ties with England and Russia. Which makes his siding with Germany very curious.

If the king referred here is the son, that close association still holds. He was, however, married to Princess Sophie of Hohenzollern royal house of Prussia, and thus perhaps the misconception. She however was again a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and pro England! The misconception is chiefly due to his holding on to Greek position of neutral stance.
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Lanny reads Greek literature to Marcel, his new stepfather the painter and wounded soldier.

"For what had this gay and eager people been brought into being on those bright and sunny shores, to leave behind them only broken marble columns, and a few thousand melodious verses embodying proud resignation and despair?

"As a result of these influences, encountered at the most impressionable age, Lanny Budd became conservative in his taste in the arts. He liked a writer to have something to say, and to say it with clarity and precision; he liked a musician to reveal his ideas in music, and not in program notes; he liked a painter to produce works that bore some resemblance to something. He disliked loud noises and confusion, and obscurity cultivated as a form of exclusiveness. All of which meant that Lanny was out-of-date before he had got fairly started in life."
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Robbie instructs his son to stay neutral despite living in Europe, and it's difficult for Lanny after two years of war. Robbie writes to him.

"“Germany is trying to break her way to the east, mainly to get oil, the first necessity of modern machine industry. There is oil in Rumania and the Caucasus, and more in Mesopotamia and Persia. Look up these places on the map, so as to know what I’m telling you. England, Russia, and France all have a share, while Germany has none. That’s what all the shooting is about; and I am begging you to paste this up on your looking glass, or some place where you will see it every day. It’s an oil man’s war, and they are all patriotic, because if they lose the war they’ll lose the oil. But the steel men and the coal men have worked out international cartels, so they don’t have to be patriotic. They have ways of communicating across no man’s land, and they do. I’m a steel man, and they talk to me, and so I get news that will never be printed.”"

"The military men were allowed to destroy whatever else they pleased, but nothing belonging to Krupp and Thyssen and Stinnes, the German munitions kings who had French connections and investments, or anything belonging to Schneider and the de Wendels, masters of the Comité des Forges, who had German connections and investments."

"“I could tell you a hundred different facts which I know, and which all fit into one pattern. The great source of steel for both France and Germany is in Lorraine, called the Briey basin; get your map and look it up, and you will see that the battle line runs right through it. On one side the Germans are getting twenty or thirty million tons of ore every year and smelting it into steel, and on the other side the French are doing the same. On the French side the profits are going to François de Wendel, President of the Comité des Forges and member of the Chamber of Deputies; on the other side they are going to his brother Charles Wendel, naturalized German subject and member of the Reichstag. Those huge blast furnaces and smelters are in plain sight; but no aviators even tried to bomb them until recently. Then one single attempt was made, and the lieutenant who had charge of it was an employee of the Comité des Forges. Surprisingly, the attempt was a failure.”

"... the same thing was happening to the four or five million tons of iron ore which Germany was getting from Sweden; the Danish line which brought this ore to Germany had never lost a vessel, in that service or any other, and the Swedish railroads which carried the ore burned British coal. “If it hadn’t been for this,” wrote the father, “Germany would have been out of the war a year ago. It’s not too much to say that every man who died at Verdun, and everyone who has died since then, has been a sacrifice to those businessmen who own the newspapers and the politicians of France.""

"England would follow her usual rule of losing every battle but the last."
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Lanny went to Connecticut to live with his father's family for the time being, as U.S. joined WWI finally, and there were large quantities of Budd clan relatives, since older generations had average ten or twenty children.

"Most of those who were not preaching the Word were employed by Budd Gunmakers Corporation in one capacity or another, and just now were working at the task of making the days of the Germans as short as possible. The Germans had their own God, who was working just as hard for his side—so Lanny read in a German magazine which the kind Mr. Robin took the trouble to send him. How these Gods adjusted matters up in their heaven was a problem which was too much for Lanny, so he put his mind on the dates of ancient Greek and Roman wars."
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A continuously recurring pleasure in reading this series is various references of literature, history, and quotes. One that forms a title of book three of World's End and thereafter recurs at key points is

"Bela Gerant Alii"

Which means "let others make war", and the first chapter heading is

"Loved I Not Honour More".

Another, in a chapter heading "Pierian Spring", about Lanny regarding his education, is reference to verses by Alexander Pope:-

"A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring."
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About the war, now that U.S. had entered:-

"The airplanes were going to be driven by “liberty motors,” and you ate “liberty steak” and “liberty cabbage” instead of hamburgers and sauerkraut. Robbie hated such nonsense; he hated still more to see the country and its resources being used for what he said were the purposes of British imperialism. ... when Robbie would remark that the British ruling classes were the shrewdest propagandists in the world, a sudden chill would fall at the breakfast table."
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About the Budd clan:-

"These odd people had a way of quarreling bitterly and never making up. Uncle Andrew Budd and his wife had lived in the same house for thirty years and never spoken. Cousin Timothy and Cousin Rufus couldn’t agree upon the division of their family farm, so they had cut it in halves and lived as neighbors, but did not visit. Aunt Agatha, Robbie’s eldest sister, went off and took up residence in a hotel, and forbade the clerk at the desk ever to announce any person by the name of Budd. That was New England, Robbie said; a sort of ingrown place, self-centered, opinionated, proud."

Lanny met his great-great-uncle Eli Budd, by his invitation, which was command since he was head of the clan, being the only surviving uncle of his grandfather Samuel Budd.

"Between these two there took place that chemical process of the soul whereby two become one, not gradually, but all at once. They had lived three thousand miles apart, yet they had developed this affinity. The seventeen-year-old one told his difficulties and his problems, and the eighty-three-year-old one renewed his youth, and spoke words which seemed a sort of divination. Said he:

"“Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.”

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: First in a series of eleven novels, introducing the character of Lanny Budd, a precocious youth on the eve of World War 1, his German and English friends and their respective fates during the war while Lanny divides his time between his glamorous mother and artist step-father on the Riviera, and in New England with his father's Puritan munitions-making family, ending up as a secretary to a geographer at the Paris Peace Conference.

Several months ago, I read and reviewed A World to Win, number seven in the Lanny Budd novels. There, a decidedly adult Lanny Budd functions as a secret agent for the president (Roosevelt) during World War 2. This novel, the first in the series, introduces us to Lanny Budd on the eve of World War 1. Raised by Beauty, his mother, he grew up in the mix of art and culture of Paris and the French Riviera. Although she was a preacher's daughter, she was rejected by Lanny's father's New England Puritan family because she had posed several times in the nude for Parisian artists, and never married Lanny's father. He acquires the artistic tastes and cultured manners of his mother's circle, and the savvy of his munitions-salesman father. He also acquires two friends at boarding school, an English boy named Rick, and a German boy of high birth named Kurt. Like other pre-pubescent teens, their discussions range from philosophy to the mysteries of girls.

All this ends with the onset of the Great War. Rick eventually ends up as an RAF flyer, married, and wounded, never to walk without pain. Kurt fights for Germany and eventually becomes involved in espionage at war's end that catches up Lanny. Beauty retreats to the Riviera, marry an artist, Marcel Detaze, whose greatest work comes after he is severely wounded, before he returns to the front, never to come back. Lanny has his first love affair with a girl destined to marry into an English house, and his first heartbreak.

After assisting his father for a period, learning to code and decode documents and meeting numerous famous figures, even Zaharoff, his father's main competitor, he returns with his father to New England, meeting his stern old grandfather, his very correct step-mother, and an enlightened old great grandfather, who kept company with the New England transcendentalists. He is used for his connections by another woman, and returns with his father to Europe wiser and sadder.

Due to language skills and his savvy and facility in meeting the rich and powerful, he serves as a secretary to a geography professor who is part of the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He witnesses the high public ideals of the Fourteen Points, and the private maneuvering among Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, for land and oil and the utter subjugation of Germany. At a point of disillusionment, he dabbles with Kurt and the socialists in a dangerous set of liaisons.

Sinclair portrays Budd against the backdrop of the Great War--the folly of the great powers who stumbled into this conflict, and eventually drew in the US. Lanny's father tries to keep him out of it all, even as his company profits greatly, as do all the munitions manufacturers. He gets an education in the power politics, and the business interests that profit by war. This sets up a tension for Budd, raised among artists and caring for the fine and noble things of life. Does he join his father in an enterprise even his father approaches with cynicism, or pursue another path?

Budd also meets the socialists, and those who have ties to the revolution in Russia, through a socialist uncle, Beauty's brother and becomes aware of the ways the rich exploit workers in every country. Lanny's father tries to protect him from such influences as well. In this first novel, we see the tensions and influences at war in Lanny, while the world is at war. Sinclair sets us up for succeeding novels in introducing us to Lanny, able to travel with and identify with artists, the wealthy capitalists, even the socialists, moving through all these circles. We wonder if he really belongs to any of them.

If there is any criticism to be laid to this novel, it is that it seems more preparatory than anything to the stories to follow. The war and the Peace Conference really are the plot, with a bit of suspense toward the end around his relationship with Kurt and his uncle. But the book serves as a great summation of World War 1 and what pre-war Europe was like. It portrays the tragedy of Paris and Versailles that made the second World War inevitable and carved up the Middle East in ways that are still having repercussions. We glimpse the graft and folly behind noble statements and patriotic sentiment. And, similar to "Pug" Henry in The Winds of War, we wonder at what famous events, and with what famous people, Lanny will turn up next.