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stvjackson 's review for:
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
by Christopher Clark
Trying to sum up this book in a succinct way is nearly impossible. Which is fitting, as there's no way to try to explain the start of World War I in any kind of concise fashion.
Christopher Clark makes a valiant effort of trying to make sense of something that, a century later, is still pretty much impenetrable. The climate of Europe at the time was such that war seemed both absolutely inevitable and completely inconceivable, and Clark does an excellent job of capturing that biploar mood. He's particularly skilled at illustrating the political climate of the era, and the deep, recurring tensions that existed throughout the continent and throughout the great powers' empires to show how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was but one of seemingly a million things that could have sparked all-out war, while also being something that was entirely resolvable. By digging into each power's ambitions and fears, and into the key politicians' and monarchs' arrogance and insecurity, he helps make it clearer how everyone sleepwalked into a war that was beyond cataclysmic and whose aftermath the world still suffers from.
That said, there are a lot of ways in which The Sleepwalkers is as convoluted, impenetrable and tedious as the world it chronicles. There are at times far too many people to track, particularly when Clark tries to show how particular events affected each of the five great powers. There are attempts at psychoanalysis that fall flat. There are deep divergences into ancillary events that, while helping illustrate the tone of the era, go into far more detail than is probably warranted for the theme and central thrust of the book.
It's a long, slow read. But despite that, it's a very illuminating read. Other histories of the war I've read have tended to focus simply on the sequence of events, without any attempt to place them into context or show how no one player was completely to blame, nor completely blameless. For that reason, despite some flaws, The Sleepwalkers is a solid attempt to explain the origins of one of the world's most momentous - and most inexplicable - cataclysms.
Christopher Clark makes a valiant effort of trying to make sense of something that, a century later, is still pretty much impenetrable. The climate of Europe at the time was such that war seemed both absolutely inevitable and completely inconceivable, and Clark does an excellent job of capturing that biploar mood. He's particularly skilled at illustrating the political climate of the era, and the deep, recurring tensions that existed throughout the continent and throughout the great powers' empires to show how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was but one of seemingly a million things that could have sparked all-out war, while also being something that was entirely resolvable. By digging into each power's ambitions and fears, and into the key politicians' and monarchs' arrogance and insecurity, he helps make it clearer how everyone sleepwalked into a war that was beyond cataclysmic and whose aftermath the world still suffers from.
That said, there are a lot of ways in which The Sleepwalkers is as convoluted, impenetrable and tedious as the world it chronicles. There are at times far too many people to track, particularly when Clark tries to show how particular events affected each of the five great powers. There are attempts at psychoanalysis that fall flat. There are deep divergences into ancillary events that, while helping illustrate the tone of the era, go into far more detail than is probably warranted for the theme and central thrust of the book.
It's a long, slow read. But despite that, it's a very illuminating read. Other histories of the war I've read have tended to focus simply on the sequence of events, without any attempt to place them into context or show how no one player was completely to blame, nor completely blameless. For that reason, despite some flaws, The Sleepwalkers is a solid attempt to explain the origins of one of the world's most momentous - and most inexplicable - cataclysms.