The Great War

Though a companion to a PBS documentary, this powerful volume offers far more than a montage of sound bites. Winter, a Cambridge historian and among the best active scholars of the subject, here writing with Blaine, the show's executive producer, interprets WWI as a cultural phenomenon that shifted boundaries between public and private spheres, blurred distinctions between military and civilian and established new paradigms for issues of race, gender, class and empire. The text makes these points by telling the war's story from the perspective of its participants at all levels, whenever possible in their own words. This personalization is no less effective for reflecting the demands of TV viewers for instant empathy. The 300 illustrations and seven maps here brilliantly complement the prose. No one seeing the photo of a horse carcass blown into a tree will ever again question either the war's contributions to surrealism or its challenge to rationality. And no one can regard the photo of ""the man with a broken face"" without realizing the matter-of-fact obscenity of all war. There are some errors of fact: German reserve units in 1914 were not, for example, concentrated in Lorraine; the British army had no Duke of York's Light Infantry in its order of battle. And some judgments are too neat: generals and statesmen weren't quite the blinkered blockheads depicted in this populist account. Nevertheless, this book stands independently of its TV counterpart as a learned and literate introduction to the event that defined a century. (Nov.)