Rating: 
Summary: Revisionist history by a master historian
Review: Niall Ferguson is arguably one of the best and brightest historians of his generation. As such, his _Pity of War_ is a new interpretation of one of the seminal events in the last 150 years. Rather than a formal "history" of the First World War, it is more of a collection of essays and papers on his take on the conflict. While his arguments are interesting, I am skeptical of many of his conclusions, and find some of his arguments bewlidering. Ferguson claims, for example, that Britain should have left Belgium out to dry, which would have ended the war with a unified Europe and Britain's Empire in tact. While I would argree that WWI destroyed the British Empire, it is a little disingenuous to claim that Germany would have "unified" Europe. Other arguments claim that it was not propoganda, but the "thrill of the fight" that kept the war going on for so long, that Germany was not militaristic, and that the Versailles Treaty was not harsh enough. Much of Ferguson's book flies in the face of the conventional wisdom on the First World War - and to be fair, some of his ideas do warrant further attention; however the bulk of the book seemed a far reach to the plausable.
Rating:
Summary: Some interesting theories, but slow-moving and inconclusive
Review: Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War" is an investigation of the causes of WWI. Not only that, it goes deeper and questions not only why it started, but why it continued, and even why it ended in the collapse of the German army on the Western Front (as opposed to the British or French, or why the collapse didn't happen earlier).
There are a number of things to like about the book. First and foremost, he successfully demolishes some deeply held beliefs that really don't make sense anyways. For example: he argues that, all things considered, life in the trenches was not as bad as post-war analysis tends to believe. He successfully convinced me that, shell-shock notwithstanding, the amount of food, wine, and prostitutes available at the front could compensate for the horrors the men faced in the front line. He also invokes the politically incorrect axiom that men like to fight - there is nothing like the threat of immenent death to sharpen the senses and thrill the body.
Likewise: he successfully convinced me that Germany was the nation most responsible for the war. In my readings, I had come to my own conclusion to blame Russia who came to the aid of Serbia after Serbia had sponsored a terrorist organisation's attack on Austria-Hungary (similar to the modern-day Taliban). Austria-Hungary was well in her rights to revenge herself on Serbia. However, through an exhaustive economic analysis, Ferguson shows that Imperial Germany was losing the arms race (and that the government knew it), and so turned what was essentially a local Balkan conflict into a World War. This is in sharp contrast to the numerous other conflicts that fizzled out in the previous 30 years.
Unfortunately, there are some flaws. First and foremost is readability - there are long passages of economic data, industrial analysis, etc. that are not overly exciting. This is compounded by the fact that he puts in a number of handy graphs, but then proceeds to explain all the graphed data in text form as well - it's repetitious. Secondly, he overly concentrates on Britain and Germany - it's almost as if France didn't exist or that they had no grievances with Germany, e.g. over Alsace and Lorraine. Thirdly, he never really articulates a reason for the German collapse after the failure of the offensive of 1917.
I'm glad I read the book. I may even refer to it from time to time. I certainly will not forget some of Ferguson's arguments and analyses. However, this is not a book I would recommend to others without hesitation. Scholars of WWI will find a lot of interest in here - especially since it is well-referenced. The lay reader (like me) may find it dull and overly detailed.
Rating: 
Summary: The Reason Why "Revisionism" Has Become Such A Dirty Word
Review: Niall Ferguson's often insightful social observations areundermined by his sometimes Jr. High level strategic-politicalpolemics--a dilletente strategist. If something doesn't concur with his thesis, he doesn't argue with it--he simply refuses to talk about it! Its what he leaves out that trips him up. If Germany was "winning" the war in 1918 (as if such a word could be applied to this war), how does he explain the exhaustion of the German spring offensives by late June, long before American numbers could make their effects felt? His trite comments about Pershing and the AEF show how little he knows about that subject(confirmed by checking his bibliography on that topic), showing how narrow his focus is--a bad habit of too many historians. If the u-boats were starving Britain, what was the Royal Navy's blockade doing to Germany (check the civilian death stats in each country due to the effects of hunger--Germany's situation was mush more severe)? Even if the BEF had been run off the continent, the blockade could have continued as a powerful bargaining chip. As for the much lauded German tactical and operational superiority, this was undermined by the strategic stupidity of getting involved in a two front war, something Bismarck always feared, and with good cause (something which Hitler stupidly repeated in the next war). The ceaseless and senseless counterattacks the Germans made against gains in the British sector needlessly increased their casualties. Hutier tactics, falling back to shorter, well-prepared defensive lines, knocking out Russia, crippling Italy, etc. all came too late. By the spring of 1918, the strategic mess Germany had gotten itself into far outweighed all these advantages. Furhermore, Germany in both wars always lost the political and public relations propoganda war due to its arrogance and incredible, self-righteous stupidity. With rock-headed Teutonic obstinancy, they began shooting Belgian priests and civilians within 24-hrs of invading Belgium, screaming about "franc-tirreurs" and the rest, as if provoking conflict with other major powers was their God given right. Why did Germany shackle itself to the dying carcass of the Austrian-Hungarian "Empire" and allow itself to get dragged into war with Russia and France? Simply because these questions have been asked endlessly, doesn't mean their too worn out to have any validity--revisionism for its own sake is merely to gain publicity (and sell more books). From a historigraphical perspective, Ferguson seems to be one of those "angry young men" of the Brit intelligensia, looking back at the fall of the British Empire and its tremendous losses and wondering why. The Douglas Haigs and other "Blimp" like characters are easy fodder for a fin de siecle critic, but such 20/20 hindsight can only be made because the distasterous mistakes themselves were made and learned from. The "Great War" could only happen once, just as WWII or Vietnam. The question is why people choose to believe and follow the propoganda and stupidity thrown at them by "Blimp" governments. I allow only God to be truly "objective" about history--all others must "pay cash" so to speak. Some arguments come closer than others. The advantage of a broader perspective, such as John Keegan's (no stranger to misjudgment to be sure), is that their is a broader and stronger base for the scholar to stand on. Ferguson deliberately set out to be "provocative" and "revisionist," thereby sacrificing in the same proportion scholarly depth and wisdom. Time will not be kind to this study.
Rating: 
Summary: a vital corrective to institutional liberal history
Review: Nothing has so warped our understanding of the 20th Century as the unfortunate fact that America's wars were, in Bob Dole's felicitous phrase, "Democrat Wars." The combination of historical circumstances which put Wilson, FDR, Truman, and JFK in power to lead the United States into WWI, WWII, The Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam has made it very difficult emotionally for the institutional Left to criticize those conflicts. It is this which explains the Left's strange silence as regards what we might otherwise expect to hear them attack as a savage and unnatural product of military-industrial capitalism. Fortunately for the Left, the accession of Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968 has allowed them to disown Vietnam, turning it into the one conflict that has truly been diminished in the public eye. Meanwhile, patriotism, even nativism, is such a powerful force on the Right that conservatives have been reluctant to question these righteous and glorious causes. These factors have combined to create an artificial national consensus about American involvement in a series of bloody and quite senseless wars. At last though, in the past few years--not coincidentally following the Cold War and the end of its dissent stifling effects--conservative historians have finally begun to produce a coherent and fairly unified critique of the century's great wars and of American (and British) participation in them. The liberating winds of these new circumstances have allowed folks to take a fresh look at a myriad of issues, allowed for A. Scott Berg's rehabilitation of Charles Lindbergh, permitted even standard issue histories like David Kennedy's Freedom from Fear to at long last acknowledge the utter failure of the New Deal, allowed the nation to finally accept responsibility for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, and so forth. But most importantly, it has led to a series of books on the threshold issue of whether fighting the wars was in our national interest to begin with. For instance, Pat Buchanan's A Republic not an Empire, though it was rather harshly denounced, raised important questions about whether it made sense for the U. S. to get involved in WWII. Niall Ferguson's Pity of War performs much the some service for British participation in the First World War, and was, not surprisingly, greeted with nearly equal vitriol. Really more of an extended analytical essay than a history of the War, Ferguson sets out to answer a series of ten questions : (1) Was the war inevitable, whether because of militarism, imperialism, secret diplomacy or the arms race? (2) Why did Germany's leaders gamble on war in 1914? (3) Why did Britain's leaders choose to intervene when war broke out on the Continent? (4) Was the war, as is often asserted, really greeted with popular enthusiasm? (5) Did propaganda, and especially the press, keep the war going...? (6) Why did the huge economic superiority of the British Empire not suffice to inflict defeat on the Central Powers more quickly and without American intervention? (7) Why did the military superiority of the German Army fail to deliver victory over the British and French armies on the Western Front, as it delivered victory over Serbia, Rumania and Russia? (8) Why did men keep fighting when, as the war poets tell us, conditions on the battlefield were so wretched? (9) Why did men stop fighting? (10) Who won the peace--to be precise, who ended up paying for the war? Because his answers to these questions are so uniformly at variance with the accepted version of history, Ferguson concludes that Britain's entry into the War was "nothing less than the greatest error of modern history." He argues that Germany had no global war aims, that she would have certainly won the war, but would have done little more than establish the same type of European trade union that modern Germany is rapidly creating. And given what Britain gave up, in terms of Empire, lives, and economic retardation, the war must therefore be seen as a complete waste. I agree with those conclusions, but think he may actually be too timid in his argument. One of the criticisms of his analysis has been that Germany had wider aims and would have eventually confronted Britain. This seems almost absurd. Unless the other nations of Europe had truly collaborated with their conqueror it is hard to imagine how Germany could have even effectively held onto them, never mind turn and attack Britain while also subjugating the entire population of Europe. There's also one strain that runs through the questions he asks, that I would have liked to see him address--the effect of democracy. It has long been assumed that democracy would tend to be more pacific than other forms of government : how then explain the nearly continuous state of war that the two great democracies, Britain and America, found themselves involved in during the 20th Century ? There would seem to be a series of interlocking causes, all functions of democracy, which contributed to this unlikely state of affairs. First, democracies are more unlikely to get involved in warfare in the first place. Opposing systems well understand this fact and are able to exploit it, so that they arm and strengthen themselves while democracies stand idly by and do nothing. If Britain really did have something to fear from German naval, colonial, and continental ambitions, the time to deal with Germany was twenty or more years earlier, when she was still weak. Similarly, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, etc., were all allowed to build themselves into serious military powers because Britain and America, their leaders beholden to the will of the people, did not stop them. Second, when war finally does come, it is precisely because it is a democratic decision that our soldiers are likely to go right on fighting even in squalid and lethal conditions. It is the totalitarian powers which tend to have their armed forces quit on them, because, in some sense, it simply isn''t their fight. Finally, the political and cultural dynamics of democracy require that every war the nation enters into be glorified and sanctified, because it was the will of the people. This means that democracies are nearly incapable of learning any lessons from these conflicts. To acknowledge that the war was a mistake would perhaps be too traumatic to the polity for such apostasy to stand. Thus, for all the cheap talk of "no more Munichs" the West does nothing even today as China tries to turn itself into a superpower, despite the obvious fact that their power will be aimed directly at us. The only remaining question, raised by books like this one and Pat Buchanan's and the ones that will eventually be written about the futility of the Cold War and the Gulf War, is whether when the next war comes, the democracies (by which we really only mean Britain and America) will have sense enough to stay out of it. If enough people read and comprehend The Pity of War, we just might. GRADE : A+
Rating: 
Summary: Pendulum of revisionism swings right....
Review: Rather than trying to cover the entire war, this book focuses on various problems, myths and misconceptions about the war. No matter what your previous views on the history of this era, this book is guaranteed to annoy, rattle and inspire you -- he has something to offend everyone's favorite theory, from left to right. Even when you don't accept his sometimes questionable conclusions, the process of getting there is well worth it.
Rating:
Summary: The joy of war
Review: The book is full of well-argued points and is mostly convincing in its stated task (explaining WWI). But, all of that is of marginal significance compared to the section of the book titled 'The Joy of War?', which, to my mind, is the most correct and truthful answer to that big, old question "Why do men fight wars?"
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Summary: For Britain resistance was/is futile?!
Review: The only publicity grabbing premise in this book was expressed in the synopsis on the back of the hardcover edition (and I paraphrase) - "that Britain fought a war to prevent a German-dominated customs union not unlike the European Union of today". First, most British politicians who support the E.U. are still fearful of admitting that Germany is its heart and soul, because they know that many British people can still remember The Blitz. But moving beyond the current political climate in Britain, I think this book will leave the reader feeling even more unsettled and less satisfied in his knowledge of the First World War than someone who has not. In fact, the more extremist Euroskeptics in Britain might even claim that certain portions of Ferguson's book are arrogant attacks on the memories of the Dead at the Somme and Paeschandaelle (you decide!) - see Rodney Atkinson's Europe Full Circle for an example of this. One reviewer mentioned that he would like to know more about Germany's war aims before accepting Ferguson's claims. For that, no source is better than Fritz Fischer's Grif Nach der Weltmacht (Grasping for World Power) published in 1961, and translated into English as Germany's Aims in the First World War. I think you will be shocked to find a great deal of continuity in the economic objectives of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and General Erich von Ludendorff and those of Adolf Hitler. Russia - weak, powerless, and exploited. The Baltic States - annexed to the Reich, uniting the old Hanseatic League into a new, 20th century Bund. Ferguson has dismissed Fischer's superb scholarship far too easily. What does this mean? Well, that World War I and World War II were not terribly different in their causes - that in both conflicts freedom stood on one side, and on the other side stood corporatism (crony capitalism and state planning wed together)and militarism. The more difficult question to ask yourself, dear reader, is this : which side has really prevailed?!
Rating:
Summary: Terrific defense of the Reich, beating back the British Hun
Review: There were no real "good guys" or "bad guys" in the Great War, but more than any other country, Germany is demonized for its role in starting the war, and among far too many uneducated American "patriots" is the notion that Britain and France heroically "beat back the HUN," some megalomaniacal beast that had consumed much of Europe and sought world domination. At least, in the past several years, many people have recognized that the Germans were in no way the monsters that they were initially made out to be, yet the Kaiser and the German war effort continue to be classified as destructive forces. This book is an excellently written revision of these misguided notions, and one the demands the attentions of any serious student of the great war. I submit that, rather than Germany being the nightmarish state that it would later become in 1933, Germany was a nation plagued by the greatst conceivable historical calamities, and, once it had finally become a world power in 1870, sought merely (at least at first) to take an equal role with its European neighbors in wolrd governance, to find its place in the sun. Furthermore, Germany was by no means the most aggressively imperialistic nation of Europe, and did not proceed to annex what was left of the uncolonized third world to the extent that Britain and France did in the 1890s. So who can we point to as the true agressors in the Great War. Surely, it must be Britain. While many believe that Germany severed its friendship with Britain by building a grand navy, the truth is that Britains navy was far larger and more powerful than the German navy, and the British Empire always remained many times larger than the German Empire. Realistically, the British had nothing to fear from German naval ambitions. And when it became clear to the German High Command that war with both France and Russia was inevitable, Germany acitvely sought some sort of agreement with Britain. To be sure, this was masked by one German show of force after another, but what Germany wanted and needed more than anything else was the friendship of the British. The potential benefits of a German-British Alliance are too numerous to recount here, but suffice it to say that such an alliance would surely have brought enough glory and power to the British Empire to sustain for several centuries, to say nothing of the benefits for Germany. Yet Britain chose the ruinous path of strife with Germany, and although the British eventually succeeded in destroying the Reich (and thereby destroying the strongest land power on earth, a perfect counterbalace for British naval supremacy), the result of the Great War was the effective end of European imperialism and global domination. Furthemore, the bitterness of the post war years resulting from the Versailles peace brought about WWII, and the de facto end of the British Empire. Thus, Britain fought the Great War on the side of anti-imperialist forces, including British imperialism. If it can be any consolation to the Germans whose Empire was shattered and for whom the Great War was an unfathomable and undigestible loss, at least the British betrayal ruined "Britannia" as well as the Fatherland.
Rating:
Summary: Great collection of essays
Review: This book doesn't necessarily hang together as a coherent unit, but it is an excellent collection of essays about the Great War. Trying to make sense of the slaughter of millions of young men for absolutely no reason and no cause is certainly difficult, and the author should be commended for allocating the blame equitably among the butchers, particularly the U.K. As an American, it's taken for granted in history fed to kids growing up that we were on the right side and that we had a reason for being involved in that senseless orgy of death. So it's nice to see an account of some of the major issues that cuts through the propaganda and assigns the proper blame to Britain and fat, old, stupid, drunken idiots like Churchill who had no problem sending an entire generation to die for no good reason.
Rating:
Summary: A great disappointment
Review: This book is an example of the fatal mistake that most of revisionist historians do. They left open more questions than those that they supposedly answered. This is especially clear when the author analises the events that led to First World War. He is so intent on probing that the war was evitable and nobody did really wanted to launch the war, that in fact the reader ends up not knowing why it was actually launched. That applies also to the end of the war, he collect an incredible amount of evidence supporting that Germany was not defeated and that the only plausible cause for surrender seems to be a sudden collapse in moral. However how it could happend is left unexplained, because, as the author keeps repeating, the blockade was not effective, the german population did not endure unbearable hardships and the German Army was killing more and better than their enemies. Ergo, No objective reason existed for a collapse in morale, except when the notorious "stab-in-the-back" hypothesys is taken into account, which the author quickly dismisses. Everything becomes worse when the post-war Europe is analised. I felt rather embarrased, reading page after page only devoted to show how mistaken Keynes was, as though every in post-war economics and politics depended on him.
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