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laurafox 's review for:
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
by Christopher Clark
So I agree with the New York Times reviewer: there really needed to be a dramatis personae included with this book (there were just too many names in Serbian!).
On the whole, I really appreciated Clark's attempts to not lay blame at the feet of one power or another (although he does have some choice things to say about Serbia's instability and Russia's push towards war), and to see this not as a crime, but a tragedy, and one with no smoking gun. After June 28, ultimately all the major powers were making steady preparations towards war, all the while claiming that the other powers were the ones who could have kept the peace by not doing the exact same thing. It'd be funny if it weren't so depressing.
(By the way, anyone who claims this was a "fast read" is a big fat fibber -- at times, I had to swim through a thick green soup of detail to get to his big-picture point.)
On the whole, I really appreciated Clark's attempts to not lay blame at the feet of one power or another (although he does have some choice things to say about Serbia's instability and Russia's push towards war), and to see this not as a crime, but a tragedy, and one with no smoking gun. After June 28, ultimately all the major powers were making steady preparations towards war, all the while claiming that the other powers were the ones who could have kept the peace by not doing the exact same thing. It'd be funny if it weren't so depressing.
(By the way, anyone who claims this was a "fast read" is a big fat fibber -- at times, I had to swim through a thick green soup of detail to get to his big-picture point.)