I was at the bookstore last night and thought, “hey, I ought to read something on WWI.” Off I went to the right section, and there were 12 books or more on it, of course. So I need some help finding a good fit for me.
I have Barbara Tuchman’s books. I’m not big on extremely detailed accounts of battles. I would like a general overview of the war from beginnings to the effects it still has on us all over the world, and information on how and what civilians did as well as soldiers.
Please do not limit yourself to what’s now in print. I’m happy to get books from the library, and to interlibrary loan anything they don’t have, so it doesn’t matter much how obscure the titles are.
Trenches of the Web has a reading list I found very helpful when I started researching the First World War.
For first person accounts I liked: Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd, A Youth in the Meuse-Argonne by William S. Triplet Chronicle of Youth : the War diary, 1913-1917 by Vera Brittain Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves,
and Tales of the Old Soldiers: nine veterans of the First World War remember life and death in the trenches by Tom Quinn
The best book ever written of the First World War, IMO, is All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Puts you right in the middle of it.
I thoroughly enjoyed Tuchman’s Guns of August, but if you are looking for individual stories that include not just the soldiers but civilians as wel… I just finished a brilliant book, Intimate Voices From the First World War, ed. by Svetlana Palmer & Sarah Wallis. It is a great collection of letters and diarys of people from all walks of life, both sides of the war, and from many different cultures… not only do you get the Western Front story, but the Eastern Front as well as the Italian and African theatres. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
OK, thanks so far. I’ll write down the memoirs and letters for a little later; they sound great but I’d like to start with a general overview to get it straight in my head. Keep 'em coming!
The Great War and Modern Memory by Fussell is a classic. Not so much a play-by-play of the War, but a survey of its lasting effects on western culture.
I also enjoyed ** Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age** by Modris Eksteins.
Eyeball Deep in Hell by Ellis gives you a good idea of just how wretched trench warfare really was.
The Donkeys, whose author I can’t remember, describes the perfectly awful generalship of the Western powers in searing terms.
Actually, the memoirs do a pretty good job of covering the big picture, because in order to put the various entries in the proper perspective, the editors have to fill you in on what’s going on at the time.
Otherwise, The Great War (and The Shaping Of The 20th Century, ed. Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett is very good. It’s based upon the fine PBS series.