Best Books of 2014 – World War One!

The arithmetic that governs centennial celebrations in the Republic of Letters is schoolishly simple: you start with one (1) bromide, you multiply it by ten (10) factoids gleaned from Wikipedia, you increase that total by the number of readers who are likely to know anything at all about your subject (Arabic civilization gave us the concept of 0), and then you tack on a “we shall be forever changed by [X]” and – presto! You’ve got yourself a commemorative volume ready for the bookstores! And the bigger the subject [X] is, the more such books will be calculated into existence. In this arithmetic, few subjects could be bigger than World War I, the start of which had its centennial in 2014. The presses poured out books, and because the subject has always fascinated me, I read them all. Most were just the kind of soulless calculations I describe, but a few very gloriously beat the math. Here are the best:

10. A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro (Basic Books) – Wawro shifts the usual focus to the problematic Hapsburg Empire’s role in the First World War, and in doing so, he manages to provide a terrific new perspective on some of the best-trod material in history. You can read my full review here.

9. Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in 1914 by Prit Buttar (Osprey Publishing) – Buttar’s fantastic, eye-openingly detailed account of the almost-unremembered war the Central Powers fought on their eastern front – in East Prussia and Galicia and the Carpathian Mountains – broke excitingly new ground for me, which was the last thing I expected any of the glut of WWI books to do.

8. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds (Norton) – Reynolds’ book acts unwittingly almost as a counter-measure to the dozens of micro-studies that appeared in 2014 concentrating on specific battles or specific campaigns (precious little on specific generals or politicians, but maybe that’ll be corrected at the 200th anniversary). He looks instead at the much broader long-term effects WWI had on Western culture and political infrastructure, and he does a neat, well-written job of it.

7. War of Attrition: Fighting the First World War by William Philpott (Overlook) – That the ultimate ‘winner’ of the First World War was the United States is just about the closest the glut of WWI books came to a common theme, and Philpott’s vigorously-written book concentrates on the pragmatics of the gradual U.S. military involvement. You can read my full review here.

6. The Great War for Peace by William Mulligan (Yale University Press) – In every celebratory crowd, there’ll always be at least one rebel, and Mulligan fills the role admirably in this extremely thought-provoking book, in which he argues that the First World War, far from being the pointless, slogging waist it’s usually considered, was an enormous reinforcement of humanitarianism, in the long run. You can read my full review here.

5. Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I by Nick Lloyd (Basic Books) – In the surge of campaign-specific accounts the WWI centenary saw, Lloyd’s was the best, a quote-rich study of the Hundred Days campaign that did so much to bring the shooting war to an end. You can read my full review here.

4. Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I by Alexander Watson (Basic Books) – It’s the bad guys who take center stage in Alexander Watson’s gripping, massive book: Germany and Austria-Hungary, their histories, their sometimes-crazed motivations, their economies, their war aims, and their ultimate fates. As with a couple of other books on this list, it’s carried along effortlessly on the strength of the author’s fine prose style. You can read my full review here.

3. The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War by Ana Carden-Coyne (Oxford University Press) – Ana Carden-Coyne moves her own WWI book away from theaters of war and decisions of state and centers it instead on the human costs of the fighting: the thousands and thousands of wounded men. Carden-Coyne traces these men through their injuries, their long and often heartbreaking recoveries, and their new lives. This was by far the best of the small-scale WWI books I read this year.

2. Fire and Movement: The British Expeditionary Force and the Campaign of 1914 by Peter Hart (Oxford University Press) – It would hardly be a centennial extravaganza if there weren’t a few invigorating revisionist titles in the midst, and Hart’s is a fine example of the breed: a dust-blowing new look at the BEF’s role on the Continent. You can read my full review here.

1. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global order, 1916-1938 by Adam Tooze (Viking) – This, the best World War I history of 2014, is actually about much more than just the immediate war, as Tooze’s subtitle makes clear. Instead, he delves deeper than any other writer into the economic and deep-sociological shifts that the war unleashed throughout the world. Anybody who’s read Tooze’s great book The Wages of Destruction will have some idea of the brilliance to expect in this new book, but even those readers will be impressed all over again. My full review coming next week in the Washington Post.