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14–18: Understanding the Great War
With this brilliantly innovative book, reissued for the one-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker have shown that the Great War was the matrix from which all subsequent disasters of the twentieth century were formed. They identify three often neglected or denied aspects of the conflict that are essential for understanding the First, what inspired its unprecedented physical brutality, and what were the effects of tolerating such violence? Second, how did citizens of the belligerent states come to be driven by vehement nationalistic and racist impulses? Third, how did the tens of millions bereaved by the war come to terms with the agonizing pain? With its strikingly original interpretative strength and its wealth of compelling documentary evidence, 14–18: Understanding the Great War has established itself as a classic in the history of modern warfare.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1998
103 people are currently reading
408 people want to read
About the author
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau
56 books6 followersStéphane Audoin-Rouzeau is a French historian. He is co-director of the Research Center of the Museum of the Great War (Historial de la Grande Guerre), based in Péronne, in the Somme.
He is the son of Philippe Audoin(-Rouzeau), a surrealist writer who was close to André Breton, and the brother of the historian, archaeologist and writer Fred Vargas (alias Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) and the painter Jo Vargas.
He is the son of Philippe Audoin(-Rouzeau), a surrealist writer who was close to André Breton, and the brother of the historian, archaeologist and writer Fred Vargas (alias Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) and the painter Jo Vargas.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
July 13, 2016
The war to end all wars..............that was the statement made after WWI. Of course we know differently but why was this war unique from all that went before? All war is devastating but the Great War engenders particular horror to those who have studied it and the author posits, correctly I believe, that it was "the matrix on which all subsequent disasters of the 20th century were formed". This book is not about the battles and the gas and trenches but rather a sociological work which attempts to answer questions about why and how civilized people could engage is such uncivilized behavior.
The book is divided into three major sections: violence, crusade, and mourning. And it does not just touch on the feelings and actions of fighting men but also examines the civilian populations who suffered (and made others suffer) through the four years of hell. We hear their words and in some cases, their excuses for what occurred and the author's interpretation of their actions.
This is a rather disturbing book that explores some of the myths that have arisen about WWI. It is not a history of the war, but a history of the effects of the war. It is a slow read but well worth the time it takes.
The book is divided into three major sections: violence, crusade, and mourning. And it does not just touch on the feelings and actions of fighting men but also examines the civilian populations who suffered (and made others suffer) through the four years of hell. We hear their words and in some cases, their excuses for what occurred and the author's interpretation of their actions.
This is a rather disturbing book that explores some of the myths that have arisen about WWI. It is not a history of the war, but a history of the effects of the war. It is a slow read but well worth the time it takes.
November 4, 2014
This is a good book on the general meaning of WW1 and 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 WW1 was 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 WW1 can 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.
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 WW1 can 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.
January 23, 2023
This book suffers from being translated from French into English. I didn't notice that fact when I stumbled upon it in an antiquarian bookstore. It is about the pain and suffering of The Great War. It looks at the individual and the collective grief and mourning from multiple perspectives. It wasn't what I expected, but I did get something out of it.
Almost 20 million people (!!!) died. If each of these mostly young individuals had an intimate circle of friends and relatives of, let's say 5 people, that's 100 million people intimately affected by the gruesome deaths of this war. Absolutely worth writing a book about!
Many good quotes – here's one from Proust (1918): I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches, which were only the recording of an heroic gesture that today is reenacted at every moment.
Almost 20 million people (!!!) died. If each of these mostly young individuals had an intimate circle of friends and relatives of, let's say 5 people, that's 100 million people intimately affected by the gruesome deaths of this war. Absolutely worth writing a book about!
Many good quotes – here's one from Proust (1918): I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches, which were only the recording of an heroic gesture that today is reenacted at every moment.
August 8, 2011
14-18 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 post-war 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, as 14-18 shows 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 mis-information 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 bottom-up phenomenon. It was only near the end of the war that what might in mid-century terms be called government "propaganda" began to be produced.)
All of this makes 14-18 a fascinating and important read. The reason I give it four rather than five stars 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 Austria-Hungary 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.
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 post-war 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, as 14-18 shows 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 mis-information 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 bottom-up phenomenon. It was only near the end of the war that what might in mid-century terms be called government "propaganda" began to be produced.)
All of this makes 14-18 a fascinating and important read. The reason I give it four rather than five stars 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 Austria-Hungary 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.
November 25, 2020
"It was not until adolescence that I grew weary of these stories [of the war during childhood]. More years were needed before I became fully aware of the atrocity of the slaughter. And still more years before I could assess its terrifying absurdity: does the history of mankind offer many other examples of such disproportion between an immense sacrifice, acquiesced in, and the actual importance of the initial stakes. In time I came to realize that this war, triggered so rashly and waged so absurdly, plunged the history of the entire century into horror. Yet as I write these words, I still experience a vague feeling of betrayal." -Quoted in 14-18
David B. Morris referred to pain as an "experience in search of an interpretation." Pain refuses to be suffered without an explanation, any explanation, so long as it casts whatever indefinite ache one feels into an existing framework of understanding. Without certainty, or at the very least a sound interpretation, pain cannot begin to heal. This instinct goes far in explaining the vast cornucopia of war literature from every conceivable perspective. The authors of this slim volume set themselves out to be the antidote to a dominant trend in war literature which treats the bloody conflicts of the twentieth century with an increasingly encyclopedic military fetishism. The popular method of military history, bracing narrative accounts of particular battles, might be compelling for their sheer detail and suspense but offer little in diagnosing the greater cultural effect of the symphony of pain that is war. 14-18: Understanding the Great War attempts to assemble a loose framework for thinking about the unique circumstances of the war and its truly unprecedented carnage and attendant grief.
As a case study, the book is an undemanding and often fascinating taster of WWI phenomena: from the brutalizing, mechanical, and progressively hate-fuelled combat, to the broader waves of religious nationalism and pseudoscientific racism that stoked the embers, and finally to the peculiarly anticlimactic ceasefire, the question of demobilization, and vast constellations of personal and social pain that materialized in the war's wake. For a novice reader of Great War literature, I found the authors to be exceptionally clear-headed guides while probing hot button issues (war atrocities, propaganda), more esoteric concerns (the Red Cross either as humanizing war or legitimizing the idea that war can be humane), and baffling oddities (the 'German odour' and the notion that they urinate through the feet). While it is certainly a valuable work for the relatively uninitiated looking for meaning in a mountain of corpses, and would most likely prove to be a breath of fresh air for ardent military historians suffering from literary trenchfoot, I think that 14-18 will ultimately prove to be a slight mile marker in my WWI education. As an individual work, it is somewhat lacking in material substance, but offers an abundance of ideological lenses through which to approach weightier volumes of history. For that it is worth reading.
May 30, 2025
Very interesting historical perspective (despite the academic tone. The authors frequently used terms like “historicised,” “museography,” “civic pedagogy”, and “eschatological expectation”). I’ve read much about the horrors of WWI, but this one takes the cake. I could barely stand to read the chapter about what was done to the civilian population. That will be in my nightmares for a long time to come. Fallen soldiers got medals. Fallen civilian victims got nothing. “At best, these victims met with indifference at home, at worst contempt. Only the fallen heroes were assigned full posthumous glory.”
WWI changed the entire practice of war. No one had ever anticipated the levels of death, atrocities, ruin, devastation, psychological and physical impacts that brand new technologies brought to the battlefield. The very idea of there being a “battlefield” changed, as battles were no longer fought in a confined space, but across a country, affecting soldiers and unprepared citizens alike. There was no longer the kind of honor code that previous wars demonstrated. Cutting off the nose and ears and gouging out the eyes of a child was not considered a dishonorable thing to do. “The Western world’s entire relationship to war was permanently and drastically altered.” “A true attack of collective sadism took possession of the troops…The work of destruction was duly carried out by men who are fathers and probably kindly in private life.” Women became the weapons of choice in the total war. Rapes, assaults, torture, starvation, forced labor, internment in prison camps--- attacking women was intended to demoralize the enemy and insult their manhood. A generation of children were orphaned and brutalized. I was surprised the authors didn’t mention the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. It’s been in two previous books I’ve read, and it was awful beyond imagining.
I was interested in how propaganda was used to make people think of the Germans as the “other,” much the way propaganda about blacks was used in the US in the 20th century, propaganda about Jews was used in WWII, and propaganda about immigrants is being used in the US today. The French publicized that the odors of French and Germans was very different. Germans, even as corpses, were said to have an alien smell, and that their very defecation was abundant and abnormally smelly; that the smell of their sweat was comparable to that of a skunk. Unfortunately, our species never learns, never changes.
WWI changed the entire practice of war. No one had ever anticipated the levels of death, atrocities, ruin, devastation, psychological and physical impacts that brand new technologies brought to the battlefield. The very idea of there being a “battlefield” changed, as battles were no longer fought in a confined space, but across a country, affecting soldiers and unprepared citizens alike. There was no longer the kind of honor code that previous wars demonstrated. Cutting off the nose and ears and gouging out the eyes of a child was not considered a dishonorable thing to do. “The Western world’s entire relationship to war was permanently and drastically altered.” “A true attack of collective sadism took possession of the troops…The work of destruction was duly carried out by men who are fathers and probably kindly in private life.” Women became the weapons of choice in the total war. Rapes, assaults, torture, starvation, forced labor, internment in prison camps--- attacking women was intended to demoralize the enemy and insult their manhood. A generation of children were orphaned and brutalized. I was surprised the authors didn’t mention the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. It’s been in two previous books I’ve read, and it was awful beyond imagining.
I was interested in how propaganda was used to make people think of the Germans as the “other,” much the way propaganda about blacks was used in the US in the 20th century, propaganda about Jews was used in WWII, and propaganda about immigrants is being used in the US today. The French publicized that the odors of French and Germans was very different. Germans, even as corpses, were said to have an alien smell, and that their very defecation was abundant and abnormally smelly; that the smell of their sweat was comparable to that of a skunk. Unfortunately, our species never learns, never changes.
September 1, 2017
Quite good not least for laying out the questions that still need to be asked (let alone answered) about WWI. Not a history but a linked series of three essays - engagements, to use a term French scholars like - on Violence, Crusade (Why People/Nations Fought) and Mourning. Especially sharp on the need for historians to act like historians and reclaim the war from veterans and politicians. It moves adroitly between the individual and the mass: the societal experience of mass death and the individual experience of death. Implicit is that WWI laid the basis for what followed in the 20th century even in small details: the graves/tombs of the parents who had lost so many sons were smaller and less ornate than those of before the war-elaborate tombs would have been unseemly.
This book really needed to have illustrations though.
This book really needed to have illustrations though.
April 21, 2025
This is a hard book to review. It is not a book about battles and the men who fought them which I tend to prefer. It's more a look at how the Great War affected the rest of the century. It looks at the unparalleled violence it created, how people coped with the losses, and how they remembered the war with monuments and memories. Frankly I think it barely scratches the surface of WWI, but it tries.
The subtitle is 'Understanding WWI.' I think it doesn't come close, but it helps, especially if you already have some knowledge of the subject. It's a monumental topic which has so many facets. The Great War has been over for more than 100 years; it basically spawned an even greater war, and we still have so much to learn.
The subtitle is 'Understanding WWI.' I think it doesn't come close, but it helps, especially if you already have some knowledge of the subject. It's a monumental topic which has so many facets. The Great War has been over for more than 100 years; it basically spawned an even greater war, and we still have so much to learn.
August 15, 2023
Des analyses passionnantes sur la grande guerre. Le consentement de la population, la guerre de "civilisation", la propagande qui en est a peine une, l'effondrement du mouvement pacifiste, la première guerre totale impliquant fortement les civils, le deuil impossible par idéalisation des morts, le nombre invraisemblable de morts et mutilés et enfin 14-18, matrice des totalitarisme par "brutalisation" des sociétés ? Grand bouquin de m Fred Vargas et sa collègue.
May 2, 2025
Rather than revisiting all of the alliances that led to the war, the authors focus on the impact of the war on all of the peoples whose lives were devastated. Staring with how it was viewed almost as entertainment as some, it quickly became a sad way of life, even early on by those who were occupied. The last two chapters are especially moving as they deal with the impact of losses and injuries to the nations, and to the families.
November 24, 2023
This is an interesting perspective on the societal influences and personal effects of this war on the people and countries involved. For me, this is a re-read of this book. I’m reading this as a preface to re-reading ‘Savage Peace: Hope and Fear In America, 1919’. Both are in support of my desire to attempt to make sense of so many events since then in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
May 10, 2017
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!
I've read this book, and quote it many times while I was in the university.
It gives such an approach!
did-not-finish
May 2, 2021I really need to stop writing papers on books I’ve never read lol
August 30, 2023
So, I think I understand World War I better now? Maybe? This was a really hard book to pin down, and perhaps it's too academically focused to be properly reviewed on here but I'll give it a shot. 14-18 is a bold attempt to explore the cultural and social history of World War I, breaking away from the usual tack of charting battlefields and analyzing grand strategy. This is a welcome change. There is certainly value to researching specific battles and military technology, but the fact that those studies often drown out the human consequences of war is a real shame. If nothing else, I admire the authors for aggressively arguing for the importance of their perspective on WWI and warfare in general.
Figuring out what their perspective actually consists of was... well, much more frustrating than it needed to be. While one chapter might exhibit real empathy for soldiers and their families caught in the machine of total war, the next usually dips into why we should consider every participant as barbaric and the natural disposition of humanity as to be brutal to our fellow man. I typically found the former much more richly supported by first- and second-hand accounts, whereas the latter read much more like a teenager who had just read Lord of the Flies for the first time. I want to emphasize that that's a bad thing. That's a bad book, and that's a bad thing.
I really had no choice but to meet in the middle with this one. I learned a great deal about the suffering that war brings on all aspects on society, beyond just the front line soldiers or their commanders. But at the same time, I was left thinking that maybe the entire point of Understanding the Great War was that The Great War was essentially impossible to understand. If that's the case, I can't help but wonder what the point of the whole exercise was in the first place.
Figuring out what their perspective actually consists of was... well, much more frustrating than it needed to be. While one chapter might exhibit real empathy for soldiers and their families caught in the machine of total war, the next usually dips into why we should consider every participant as barbaric and the natural disposition of humanity as to be brutal to our fellow man. I typically found the former much more richly supported by first- and second-hand accounts, whereas the latter read much more like a teenager who had just read Lord of the Flies for the first time. I want to emphasize that that's a bad thing. That's a bad book, and that's a bad thing.
I really had no choice but to meet in the middle with this one. I learned a great deal about the suffering that war brings on all aspects on society, beyond just the front line soldiers or their commanders. But at the same time, I was left thinking that maybe the entire point of Understanding the Great War was that The Great War was essentially impossible to understand. If that's the case, I can't help but wonder what the point of the whole exercise was in the first place.
August 3, 2015
“14-18: Understanding The Great War” helps the reader understand the War through the understandings of those who fought it, lived through it and commemorated it. Chapter by chapter the authors examine how civilized societies turned into brutal warriors, collectively and individually, and how they dealt with this transformation.
The magnitude of the struggle was unprecedented. The neat wars of the past between professional armies were replaced by total war as masses were inducted into the military and entire nations were channeled into support of the war effort. Civilians who had never fought before found themselves hating enemies they did not know, picking off perfect strangers and cleaning trenches of the frightened and wounded. What would they report about their service? Although uniformed personnel suffered most of the casualties, civilians found themselves bombarded, expelled from their homes and forced to work for their country’s invaders. How do they reconcile their loyalty to homeland with their acts of self-preservation? How did the war affect the people’s faith and how did men of the cloth and their flocks pray to the same God for help in killing their fellow men? How did individuals and nations assuage their grief and with what rituals did they conduct their mourning?
Authors Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker raise and try to answer these questions and more. Originally written in French by French scholars it focuses on the French experience, but not the exclusion of other belligerents. The writing flows so well that I would not have known that it was a translation had I not been told. I did pick up a few facts of interest. Australia was the only significant belligerent not to adopt conscription, most armies were dominated by peasants and War Memorials listing the dead and tombs of the unknown arose in the wake of the Great War. At times I concluded that the American Civil War anticipated the course of the World War I and its aftermath. A fairly balanced study of the Armenian Massacre is presented as the Turks sought to remove civilians potentially sympathetic to the Ottoman Empire’s Russian enemies. At the end of this work I felt that I was aware of some currents flowing below the surface of battle and politics that so often dominate other tomes. Understanding will take more reflection and more reading. It is a good read early in the Centennial as it will help readers appreciate some of the thoughts they will encounter in future histories. For that it is worth picking up.
I did receive a free copy of this book with the hope, but not the requirement, of a review.
The magnitude of the struggle was unprecedented. The neat wars of the past between professional armies were replaced by total war as masses were inducted into the military and entire nations were channeled into support of the war effort. Civilians who had never fought before found themselves hating enemies they did not know, picking off perfect strangers and cleaning trenches of the frightened and wounded. What would they report about their service? Although uniformed personnel suffered most of the casualties, civilians found themselves bombarded, expelled from their homes and forced to work for their country’s invaders. How do they reconcile their loyalty to homeland with their acts of self-preservation? How did the war affect the people’s faith and how did men of the cloth and their flocks pray to the same God for help in killing their fellow men? How did individuals and nations assuage their grief and with what rituals did they conduct their mourning?
Authors Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker raise and try to answer these questions and more. Originally written in French by French scholars it focuses on the French experience, but not the exclusion of other belligerents. The writing flows so well that I would not have known that it was a translation had I not been told. I did pick up a few facts of interest. Australia was the only significant belligerent not to adopt conscription, most armies were dominated by peasants and War Memorials listing the dead and tombs of the unknown arose in the wake of the Great War. At times I concluded that the American Civil War anticipated the course of the World War I and its aftermath. A fairly balanced study of the Armenian Massacre is presented as the Turks sought to remove civilians potentially sympathetic to the Ottoman Empire’s Russian enemies. At the end of this work I felt that I was aware of some currents flowing below the surface of battle and politics that so often dominate other tomes. Understanding will take more reflection and more reading. It is a good read early in the Centennial as it will help readers appreciate some of the thoughts they will encounter in future histories. For that it is worth picking up.
I did receive a free copy of this book with the hope, but not the requirement, of a review.
August 27, 2018
This was more of a case study on WWI than a true history. However, still definitely worth the read as it was clearly influential; most books on the Great War that came before (written 2000) as these authors were willing to record the tales of atrocities and what the war actually meant to the belligerents. We now see it as a horrific bloodshed, pointless in the fact that it was about nationalistic patriotic and religious fervor, but on all sides, in most cases even the same faith. Assuming this was the War to End All Wars, there were seemingly infinite state sponsored memorials once the ordeal was over, but no real answers for why the slaughter needed to happen; only a single nation, Germany, was declared responsible in any way for anyone's hardships. This is a true eye opener as the authors make the argument: why didn't journalists and citizens get to ask the right questions in so-called free societies, such as what is this whole conflict even about? Why can't we negotiate a peace sooner? Why aren't we honest about this war and expected to be zealots when it comes to our own nation? Nationalism is in itself a tragedy as we would find out a mere 20 years after the battles that were supposed to be the last war in history. A dark tale, but it needed to be said.
May 30, 2016
I'm enjoying this brief book immensely. It doesn't attempt to summarize the events of the war, but to examine how we might think anew -- or teach anew -- about this event, now a century past. It's really a series of essays or lectures by two very smart and sensitive people who know the facts, but believe more is necessary for a better understanding. How, for example, are we to think about the extraordinary violence of the war? A product of technology? propaganda? "race" hatred? barbarism? They argue that it's necessary to confront the morbid, ghoulish facts and material evidence in order to really understand the horror, and discuss how and why different nations and generations have given the violence a different spin over the years. All very fascinating. There are more ideas per page here than in most WWI books you'll find.(less)
February 10, 2019
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. 14-18 looks at the psychological impact of the war across a variety of populations during and after the war. It's broken into 3 sections 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.*
*I receive a free copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway, all opinions are my own.*
January 20, 2015
Somehow felt unsatisfying after reading it, perhaps because I was never really convinced it was saying something that wasn't already intuitive or that we weren't already taught about WWI. Apparently it is a significant academic writing about WWI history but, coming from a layman's point of view, the nuances are too subtle for us to care about. This is a very broad book that covers a lot of aspects of the war and is less interesting for those interested in more focused books. The book also seems like an preliminary study at a summary level, so one leaves it not feeling overwhelmingly convinced.
September 10, 2009
A moving exploration of the cultures of violence, martyrdom and grief brought into existence by the Great War. Originally written in French, the book presents its ideas in an evocative style and makes more sweeping claims than is usually the case in English-language historiography; the authors are also participating in French historical debates which may have less significance to a foreign audience. However, 14-18 is very successful in its invocation of the profound transformations wrought by the experience of "total war," and offers insightful, psychologically grounded analysis of World War I and its reverberations.
July 31, 2016
The book is less a historical analysis of the Great War, but more of a look into the aspects often overlooked by war books, e.g. grief, global sentiment, daily routines of soldiers, things like that. It's enjoyable at times because it does give you insights into some crucially overlooked details, but it lacks in cohesiveness and feels disjointed (partially in part b/c it bounces around in time).
IMO, If you don't have a good idea as to the background and history of WW1, it's going to be hard to enjoy it.
IMO, If you don't have a good idea as to the background and history of WW1, it's going to be hard to enjoy it.
April 12, 2017
"14-18" is complicated, anthropological, and wholly interesting in its examinations of the societal impact of the Great War. They answer questions of greatness, of intimacy, of mourning, of religion, and of the body. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker make their presentations seem simple and logical, but they have flawlessly consolidated volumes and decades of research and insight into something fresh and unique. This book is sure to completely change one's perspective on the war that really threw the world we know today into motion.
February 17, 2016
The 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.
February 8, 2017
The book was well written, however I do not feel that it was very concise. On the flip side, I thought the topics were kind of scattered. The first section on violence seemed to be the authors main focus, as it permeated into the other sections. Thought it got me thinking on a couple of different topics, I just don't feel that, overall, it aids an "overall understanding" of World War One, only stretches minor themes.
April 10, 2007
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.
November 15, 2014
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.
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.
December 18, 2010
More about World War I scholarship than about WWI. Not what I'm looking for right now. Maybe one day I'll return to it, but I doubt I'll ever be so interested in scholarship, history, and WWI as to do so.
January 13, 2016
Well that was dark.
Also very, very interesting study of the personal/individual emotional journey of the war with the collective/societal narrative. Unusually focused on the experiences of women and children, which was fascinating and unexpected.
Also very, very interesting study of the personal/individual emotional journey of the war with the collective/societal narrative. Unusually focused on the experiences of women and children, which was fascinating and unexpected.
June 5, 2007
Attempt by French authors to achieve the title. Interesting, but not the place to start an exploration of WWI.
August 9, 2011
A tough read regarding the Historiography of WWI. I struggled with the style, but it provided good information on the war and historian thoughts on it.
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