Description
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
By Christopher Clark. These are heady days for historians. While the 1990s saw one 50-year retrospective after another on the Second World War, for those writing on the First World War the centennial of all centennials is fast approaching.
After a century it remains the ultimate historical whodunit.
How did Europe, at the height of its glory, commit collective suicide, drowning centuries of progress in the bloodletting of 1914–18?
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.
Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict.
Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward so quickly.
Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore our world apart.
Softcover, 8″×5.3″, 697 pages
