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Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War
Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War
Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War
Audiobook39 hours

Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War

Written by Jorn Leonhard

Narrated by David de Vries

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany's leading historian of the twentieth century's first great catastrophe explains the war's origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora's Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come.

Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the everyday tactics of dynamic movement and slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers. But the war was much more than a military conflict, or an exclusively European one. Leonhard renders the perspectives of leaders, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary men and women on diverse home fronts as they grappled with the urgency of the moment and the rise of unprecedented political and social pressures. And he shows how the entire world came out of the war utterly changed.

Postwar treaties and economic turbulence transformed geopolitics. Old empires disappeared or confronted harsh new constraints, while emerging countries struggled to find their place in an age of instability. At the same time, sparked and fueled by the shock and suffering of war, radical ideologies in Europe and around the globe swept away orders that had seemed permanent, to establish new relationships among elites, masses, and the state. Heralded on its publication in Germany as a masterpiece of historical narrative and analysis, Pandora's Box makes clear just what dangers were released when the guns first fired in the summer of 1914.
LanguageEnglish
TranslatorPatrick Camiller
Release dateDec 12, 2018
ISBN9781541447103
Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War

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Rating: 4.666666666666667 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Tremendous book but not for the faint of heart. Tremendous detail and story telling but at times the volume of information can almost seem to be too much. If I had a critique is that possibly in two volumes would have been an option to consider. For anyone (and really I mean anyone whether you think you know WWI or not) this is an informative and interesting listen. The narrator does a great job in tone and pace to keep things going. It’s a little hard to start but keep going and will be well rewarded
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Jörn Leonhard, Professor of European History at the University of Freiburg, begins and ends with the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, and the “swarm of evils that rushed out [from it] and spread in a flash over the earth. . . . “ It was only with difficulty, he notes at the end of this monumental and comprehensive history of WWI, that the extremes of violence unleashed in August, 1814 could be trapped again, and a peaceful international order established. But alas, not for long.This history begins with an exploration of its antecedents to WWI in an introductory chapter called “Legacies.” Here the author discusses the widespread emancipation movement; transition from monarchies to popular political participation in government; the rise of the nation-state and nationalism; the global spread of progress; and changing self-image of individuals, to list a few. He also explores the changing territorial boundaries with accompanying changes in balances of power, along with rivalry for territories outside of Europe. He devotes a great deal of verbiage to the “Incubation of the War,” with various actors in Europe making calculations and changes based on their assessments on what the others were doing, which was both fed by and increased a “crisis of trust.”He then goes into “Drift and Escalation”; “Stasis and Movement;” “Wearing Down and Holding Out”; “Expansion and Erosion”; “Onrush and Collapse”; “Outcomes”; “Memories”; and “Burdens.”In that last section, summing up, Leonhard remarks that there has been a tendency for WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust to be superimposed on the memory of WWI: “there the First World War is not the past but the pre-past.” Regardless, he maintains, we are still today heirs of that [first] war, which seemed to legitimize violence as a response to social change.The book has extensive references, and includes maps and photographs within the text.Evaluation: One would be hard-pressed to find a history of WWI so exhaustively comprehensive as this one, as its size - over 900 pages without notes - would suggest. This makes it rather difficult to review except for the barest of summations, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t merit delving into on your own. Unlike many books that concentrate on battle strategy and tactics, and/or “great men” driving history, this history takes place on a loftier plane>. It doesn’t ignore those usual emphases, but puts them into a much broader context than that in which they are usually reported.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a tough book for me to rate. Honestly, it was not a pleasant and enjoyable reading experience for me. Nevertheless, it is a meticulously researched and exhaustively detailed book on a seminal historical event. If you are the scholarly sort, with a deep and abiding interest in World War I, or even history in general, this is likely the “go-to” book on the subject. On the other hand, if you are reading simply for enjoyment, look elsewhere.This book is a real doorstop, incredibly dense (not just in the depth of its subject, but physically) and difficult to even hold when reading in bed. It is heavy and cumbersome with over 900 pages of text and another hundred or two in endnotes, bibliographies and indexes. I read a lot of very long books, but this one took me seemingly forever to read, such was the complexity of the subject matter and the author’s treatment of it. If you read it at night, it will often times put you to sleep after 15-20 minutes.I rate it at 5 stars, because I believe it accomplishes what the author set out to do; that is to produce a comprehensive analysis of the factors leading to, involved in and following the First World War. That being said, I believe the target audience for this work is relatively small.