1914 to 1918 - A World Undone - The Story of the Great War

Easily readable while being a comprehensive history of the Great War. The author mixes interesting details and anecdotes together with a factual narration of sweeping events. Recomended for those interested in history who want to be entertained at the same time. .

The interplay between leading personalities was insightful (though biased in some cases) but got boring pretty quick. Given a large portion of the book is focused on said interplay and a dive into individual personalities, i made it to 1918, read the woefully shallow (militarily speaklng) description of Michael and gave up.

I agree with the previous reviewers that this is a great contribution to the layman's (me) understanding of WW I. I do wish there were 4-5x more maps, I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time returning to the relevant map (I have a phobia of marking books so I didn't dog-ear the maps).

One egregious editing error is on p 417 in the 1917 section. The text states that U-boats sank 180,000 ships in January, 1917 comprising 300,000 tons. Clearly that should be 180 ships as there were only ~100 U-boats in the German fleet. (either that or they were sinking fishing dingys)

The causes of World War I were so diverse and complex, and the military strategies so intricate, that the war becomes a historian's ultimate dilemma: Write about it comprehensively and lose all but the most earnest readers, or skim the surface and don't do it justice? Mr. Meyer has found the perfect balance and tone to describe a war that was complicated, not at all glorious, and a proximate or ancillary cause of every major trouble the world has seen since. His journalistic skills serve the reader with startling immediacy, never forgetting to include the human effects of the war, so that rather than becoming an endless parade of statistics, the book is a riveting parable about a four-year train wreck of human miscalculation and arrogance in leadership, balanced by unbelievable heroism in the ranks. As I write this, the American nation is still embroiled in a seven year war in Iraq and Afghanistan that has killed 5,000 American soldiers so far. That was a typical DAY in World War I. Our modern 24 hour cable news cycle will (thankfully) just not permit the kind of carnage that the generals in World War I so casually created. Also of great interest are Mr. Meyer's short background articles, on subjects like Kaiser Wilhelm, the Junkers, the Cossacks, etc, which give the reader a real grounding in the flavor of the times, and are fascinating in their own right.

Our leaders today are, like Tom Brokaw, agog over World War II, and the generation that won it. A shame. The war they really need to take lessons from is World War I, and Meyer's book is what they should read. This book is a triumph of history with the narrative pace of a novel. Don't miss it.

I suggest readers who want to go deeper into World War I book-end this volume with The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, and Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan.

This is the most recent of several histories of WWI I've read over the years, and it is by far the best. It is much more comprehensive than any of the others, and a much more enjoyable read as well. I can recommend it without reservation.

I enjoyed this book a lot, it's just what I was looking for: I wanted to get the big picture of what happened in WWI. Great mix of biography, historical background and battles. Great flow of narrative, never too much or too little.

It manages to be entertaining without getting too bogged down into details of treaties, political intrigues, battlefield tactics etc.
One gripe though..the author refers to Australian, New Zealand & Canadian troops serving with the British as 'colonial soldiers'. These countries were independent nations by that stage, not colonies. To me this demonstrates only a cursory understanding of how the British Empire functioned at that stage. It was like NATO in many ways, those countries owed allegiance to Britain and would support it in it's wars, but expected Britain to come to their aid if they were in trouble.

We have all read historical reports of World War I, but Author Meyer prefaces some of his chapters with "BACKGROUND" notes which clarify why certain things HAD to happen the way they did - does not mitigate the horror of war, but explains the world as it was in the early 20th Century. Meyer's writing style is easy to read and compelling. This book is a MUST for history buffs and also for people who want to know about the past of Western civilization.

I have always been interested in the history of WW2 as a way to understand the world as it is today but eventually came to the conclusion that I had to go back in time in order to better appreciate the causes of WW2 and this meant to learn more about WW1.

Sadly, WW1 is not as fancy as WW2 as it is almost a century old but "A World Undone" makes a great job in explaining the social and political situation of the world at that time. Combine this with a wonderful narrative style and you have a superb book on the subject.

Get yourself this book and you will enjoy it as much as a very well written novel.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty good book covering a heck of a lot of history in a fairly short amount of time. While the book does conflict in some cases with other histories of the Great War that I have read these instances are rare, and the book is, over all, enlightening about a very confusing subject.

"The complete screw ups by men, nations, politicians."

This would be my title for this book. The shear pain of seeing how it all started, the dirty deals, driven by past bitterness, greed and lack of responsibility for their actions, is what this book is about. The results? How about the complete slaughter of men, animals, towns and civilians to start. If our current battles had produced these kinds of losses on a daily basis, hundreds of thousands, I think the populations would riot.

-Good points?
Id like to believe the author is as accurate as possible; keeping track of memorials, cemeteries and survivors documents is a tough task. He focus's on the land battles and the complete ignorance and pride of some of the military leaderships portrayed, where decisions to move forward were not made with any grasp of costs. Somehow, I feel the same idiots are walking amongst us today, fortunately they are in charge of Garrison's, and not in the scope of battle planning or operations.

-Bad point?
The author only touches on one of the most significant naval engagement in history, between mammoth battle-wagons, with a mere 5 or 6 lines of activity regarding the battle of Jutland. How rude and unfair.

Would I recommend it?
Sure............where else can you read about the complete slaughter of men in battle, by the tens of thousands at a time.

As a history buff I found this book a mine of new and fascinating information. It takes you inside the minds of the people who were making the decisions. Meyer manages to expose the complex webs of socio political forces driving the war in a simple clear and compelling narrative.

Great stories. Unfortunately you have to plow through a lot of minutiae to get to the stories. After every battle you get a recap of how many shells were fired, how much they weighed, how many people were hurt and how many died. Skim the tedium, the people are worth reading about.

A brilliant account of The Great War in a single volume. The author does a masterful job pulling together the complex stories that led up to the war and how those played out on the battlefield. Meyer also pulls no punches when discussing the personalities involved and the idiotic decisions that lead to one of the greatest slaughters in modern history. I was a little surprised by the amount of humor the author brought to the book and at first it was a bit jarring, not something I expected to find in a work on such a horrific event. But the more I read, the more I appreciated his take on certain events, which can only be described as laughable, though in a "gallows" humor kind of way. I would add that this account easily took half of what I thought I knew about The Great War and dashed it to pieces. If you want to read one book that explains the First World War, this is it.

In his introduction to "A World Undone," G.J. Meyer recounts being enthralled by the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, with its haunting portrayal of a soldier’s experiences in World War I. If only, he thought, someone could tell the story of the Great War with that sort of directness, without couching it in scholarly theories—then people would see the war for the profound human story that it is.

That’s the task Meyer undertook in writing this book, but he only partially succeeds. The First World War was a vast event, encompassing continents and nations, battles that segue in and out without clear start or end points. At times it seems A World Undone does not fully grasp what a complicated thing the war really was. Meyer presents people, places, and actions in rapid fire, leaping from one nation to another or between political and military concerns with almost dizzying speed. This is necessary to encompass the whole history in 700 pages, but somewhat against what Meyer implies in his introduction, the material does not organize itself. Whether or not the author intends to offer up a specific interpretation of the war, he does need to find a narrative throughline, and that is where Meyer has primarily failed. There is a profound quantity of information here, but it sometimes feels aimless, vignettes that sit about without supporting a broader picture of the conflict.

With these caveats in mind, a determined reader could certainly use Meyer’s book to get into the subject. It addresses many of the complexities of the war, even if it does so in a somewhat haphazard manner. Of special note are the “background” segments that appear after most chapters and discuss subjects from the reigning dynasties to the changing literature of the war era. These sections can be read as they appear, or could be taken all together before reading the main text; this is the kind of contextualization modern students of World War I need to help us understand its causes and consequences.

This was the conflict known as the war to end all wars. It certainly did no such thing, but it did almost single-handedly lay the foundations of the geopolitical world we live in today. For this reason a familiarity with the war is crucial, and "A World Undone" is a decent starting point.

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Wow! This book should be mandatory reading for anyone remotely interested in WWI. G H Meyer provides a fascinating perspective of a horrendous conflict fraught with antiquated trench warfare, petty jealousies, insubordination, whole armies quitting, their gas vs our gas, calvary vs. machine gun mentality facilitated by pompous stubborn field commanders who cared more about their individual careers than the lives of almost 10 million men and women. The book not only describes the battles in stunning detail but more importantly delves into the lives of those in charge some who fled to asylum and others to obscurity. One finishes the book mentally exhausted wondering what was gained or learned by this tragic folly, apparently nothing.

I perhaps did Meyer a disservice by reading Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" before starting this book, which by contrast was not only a work of brilliant scholarship but lively and interesting. Covering these same events Meyer's writing was smeary, impressionistic, and dumbed down to the point that it may as well have been from the 'For Dummies' series. Worse yet, he jumps around haphazardly between theaters of operations, even in consecutive paragraphs -- I suppose this is meant to convey simultaneity, but it ends up just seeming perfunctory and distracting. Some major theaters of war (e.g. Salonika) he gives only the briefest treatment, others (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands) he leaves out entirely. He fails miserably to portray the unspeakable horror of the trenches, including (significantly) the major role of infectious diseases like typhus and trench fever in the mortality the combatants suffered. It is really a disappointing book, too soft to appeal to someone who has read more on the subject and too dull to appeal to a newcomer.

You live with the results of the Great War to this day. This is the book that will tell you the legacy of the most tragic war of the 20th Century.

This book is a fair read at over 500 pages. It correctly skips some of the naval battles or minimizes the effects because they matter little to the ultimate outcome of the war: a German win at Jutland would not have broken the British blockade . The narrative of the story goes between large multinational events to stories of individuals. One of the most compelling stories that come to a reader is that of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Other stories are for Tsar Nicholas and all the other world leaders. A reader will come to know the players. What is madding to read in this book is if just one small thing had changed in any player then the Great War would have never taken place.

This reviewer does not like the Great War. The soldiers of both sides on the western front are good young men who believe in family, the nation, their society, their religion and have a good work ethic. So, how does western civilization replay them? They are shot, shelled, gassed, stabbed, or get sicknesses by the tens of millions. The poor women of the period are forced into "War Spinsterhood" and denied the choice of getting married. Millions of people die of starvation. Genocide used for the first time against a minority religious group.

Even the leaders of the War are not isolated from its effects. One of the most sad is the story of Von Ludendorff who loses his beloved adopted sons and has his beautiful wife go insane from the loss of her sons. In one of the few successful late war advances into France by German forces, Von Ludendorff finds the grave of his fighter pilot step-son and has the body moved. After the war Von Ludendorff gives support to Hitler's party, comes to his senses, and in the declining years of his life tries to reverse his poor decisions. A very happy man in 1913 is broken, bitter, and dying by 1931. Repeat this story for every major leader in WWI. It's madness!

This book is extremely good reading but "good" is not a term that should be used in conjunction with the Great War. Basic military tactics are given to the reader, the German attacks are explained in detail, and the overall scope of the war is told to the reader with great skill.

America gets into the war for two reasons: it's because of a clumsy German foreign policy and financial reasons. If Germany had not done the Zimmerman Telegram or unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917 then the American public would have never supported the war and would have faced financial collapse by late 1917 or 1918 because we had supplied millions to keep the allies in the war.

Weirdly, I knew quite a bit about the Great War and this book confirmed much of what was already known. The war degrades into a glorified stalemate in the West. Russia has great commanders but is far too corrupt to triumph on any battlefield victories. Austria-Hungary is merely a liability to Germany.

This book vastly expanded my basic knowledge of the Great War. However, it confirmed my initial impression of the war: it was wasteful madness that has absolutely NO good effects.

The book is five stars.

I just completed reading G.J. Meyer's book "A World Undone: The Great War 1914-1918". And I highly recommend it to anyone who would like a better understanding of World War I. It is a well written and concise but detailed narrative history of the war. The book does an excellent job of pulling together all the fronts and the political wrangling that lead to the blood spilled. Between the chapters dealing with the major battles, there are short chapters dedicated to the main characters of the war that fill you in on their background to help you better understand their decisions and the creeping madness that eventually afflicted all of them.

In a sense, the world was at war much longer than just the 4 years between 1914 and 1918. The start of World War I was the result of European conflicts deeply rooted in the areas in which the war was fought. The Balkan Wars of 1912, the Hapsburg Empire's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 and the Franco-Prussian wars of the 19th century all played a part in bringing about the First World War.

The people of Europe cheered as the war began. This was the time to right old wrongs, to regain territories and honor taken away through previous conflicts. No one expected the war to last very long. No one thought the slaughter would be on a scale unheard of in all of history. Every European believed that victory was imperative and were told by government propaganda machines the enemy wanted nothing less than the total destruction of their homeland and that to try for peace was to commit national suicide. As their men marched off to war excitement was high and victory expected in every country.

As for the war itself, it was madness. Millions of men, standing in fetid conditions taking the pounding punishment of artillery barrages and sniper fire day after day for four years is an unimaginable hell. We get squeamish at the thought of a few thousand killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The soldiers of World War I faced HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS killed during every new offensive of the war. Wave after wave of men were hurled at positions so strongly defended as to be impregnable. The results were (of course) always catastrophic.

In the end, there were 9.8 million military deaths and the seeds of the next "great war" were sown as Germany surrendered without a single enemy having set foot on home soil.

Worldwide there are only 3 confirmed Veteran's of World War I left alive. Three more soldiers to go and then this war will have passed irretrievably into history's fog like all other wars before it.

I would recommend reading this book to anyone who is looking to get a grasp on this war. 5 Stars.

Quite pleased with this Audible purchase. If not outstanding, narrator Robin Sachs does a good job with G.J. Meyer's book. What makes this book particularly valuable is Meyer's "background" sections going into decades or even centuries' worth of history on the Ottoman, Austria-Hungarian, Russian, etc. empires, and the pasts and motivations of many major figures. If you read or listen to only one general history of 1914-18 during this centennial of the Great War, you'll be well served.

I really liked this book. I've been trying for ages to find a readable book on World War I. When I started reading some of the murder mysteries set in the era, Maisie Dobbs (Book 1) by Jacquiline Winspear and the Reavle Family, At Some Disputed Barricade: A Novel (World War I), and We Shall Not Sleep: A Novel (World War I) by Anne Perry, I wanted to know more about the historical background of these events.

I first tried an account written by Arthur Conan Doyle, a book by the author of Sherlock Holmes would surely be readable, right? Yes and no. In no time I was thoroughly bogged down in statistics. Much like the American Civil War, the sheer number of casualties is so staggering to most authors that they don't seem to get much beyond them. Books like this are mostly names of famous generals, battles, terrains, casualties, disagreements among great men and not much else. (Shelby Foote, Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vol. Set), manages to bring more of a sense of drama to the Civil War, however).

My father had enjoyed all of Churchill's work, and I'd heard that he wrote well, so I tried reading Winston Churchill's account,The World Crisis, 1911-1918, but again I got bogged down, this time in the staggering amount of behind the scenes detail. I did find the thorough discussion of his attempts at modernizing the British navy interesting, but after a while the discussions of the desired cannon diameters for effective naval battles and the benefits of dreadnaughts vs destroyers, etc. get a girl down. I think it really is a guy thing.

In fact for most writers about World War I, it's all about war. For me it's about the people and how war changed them and their world. What I was looking for essentially was something more of the human drama of the thing. Meyer's covers things like the effects of civilian rationing, the social effects of women moving effectively into the workplace in jobs formerly considered beyond their capabilities (especially in the area of munitions), and the "make do" efforts of thousands of families facing shortages in almost every type of supply, etc. Especially in chapter 25 he clearly details the drastic effects of war on civilian populations everywhere.

The author is especially good at describing the world that lead up to the war. From his discussion of the domino structure of world politics at the time, it would appear that the war was always a disaster waiting to happen. It reminded me of Per Bak's, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality sand pile experiments and self-organizing criticality. According to that author--and others like Stuart Kaufman of the Santa Fe Institute--most events that can happen will, and they will take all degrees of size, strength, etc. that are possible at one time or another. It's the "when" of it all that makes it difficult to predict. An event like Hurricane Katrina was always going to happen sooner or later; it was that sticky "when" detail that posed the problem for New Orleans. Furthermore, the more variables you add to the issue, the harder it is to predict the actual scenario. So it was for Europe prior to World War I. All the plans put in place to control the political status quo and prevent war from occurring or at least limiting its damage to any given subset of people, were so entangled that when things started to go wrong, it slid into total disaster. And just as with Bak's sand piles, there was no predicting which "grain of sand" or where it might be placed that would cause the slide--maybe physicists should be part of world diplomacy.

I enjoyed the discussion of the various personalities involved, not only in the military conduct of the war, but with the political management of the various countries. I also enjoyed reading of some of the lesser figures, like Madame Caillaux, whose activities led to major changes of direction in events. It certainly revealed the extent to which seemingly insignificant individuals can have an unexpected impact on world events--sort of the flapping wings of a butterfly in Japan causing a hurricane in California type of event.

From the author's statistics alone I was brought to wonder just what kind of a genetic impact removing something like 1/3-1/2 the reproductive age male population of Europe might have had on the gene pool of succeeding generations. If the black death could leave its imprint in genetics--and it did in some areas of Europe--what effect might a war of such staggering proportions have?

A fascinating account, but I'd still like to see a little more of the social history of the period.

This is a very readable history of World War I. I have read a number of books about World War II, but I kind of shied away from World War I because I felt that it was basically trench warfare with generals stuck in the past who could think of nothing better than throwing soldiers at machine guns. I had read All Quiet on the Western Front, so I felt I did have somewhat of an understanding as to what trench warfare was all about. My eyes were open by reading the recent book Lawrence in Arabia. Much more was involved in World War I than the Western Front. Thus my appetite was whetted to read a more general book about the war.

I picked this book by G.J. Meyer because I was reading another book by him on The Borgias. I liked his approach. His approach works even better in A World Undone. A chapter will address, in general chronological order, a battle or occurrence during the war, and then background material pertinent to that topic is interposed, such as the role of women during the war, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire, the Junkers, what was happening on the home front in the major countries involved in the war, etc. It is not a detailed blow by blow account of battles, but a more general account of what happened, how many casualties suffered in major battles, why offensives didn't work, etc. I also learned about some very good generals of each major country as well as some very poor ones. I now have a much better understanding of what went on during the war. I am now reading The Long Shadow by David Reynolds, addresses the legacy of the war. A World Undone is a very good and enjoyable book, and I highly recommend it.

"A World Undone" was a very easy-to-read 618 pages of text that I literally hated to put down. Meyer seems to have found an ideal balance between detail and explanation, and I enjoyed pretty much every page. The main divisions ("Parts") of the book are devoted chronologically to the immediate months before the war (Part 1), then to each year of the war (Parts 2-6). Each chapter of the story itself is interleaved with a short background chapter on a specific topic ("The Hapsburgs", "The Ottoman Turks", "The Junkers", etc). I found this arrangement very logical and the background "chapters" were the perfect place for information - which while interesting, and in some cases necessary - did not fit easily into the story of the war. I found Part 1- the run-up to the war - especially interesting. As other reviewers have pointed out, the troubles in the balkans have never really been resolved to this day. The only quibble I have, a minor one, is that I wish there were more maps showing phases of the battles he describes. I have this quibble with almost every military history I read, though, so no big deal. This is a great read!

The author seriously deserves a standing ovation. To document an event so enormous, so complex and so influential and present it in such an extremely well written, illuminating, edifying and enticing manner is skill only a very few select writers have. Having read several books on the topic, taken the Teaching Company course on it and having seen a number of documentaries, Mr. Meyer's book is head and shoulders above all the rest. I can't even begin to imagine how long it took him just to do the research, much less write what he wrote.

"A world undone" is the story of the Great War, but not just the military story. To help the reader understand fully why and how things happened the way they did, the author inserted short chapters about the Romanov dynasty, about the Hapsburg family, about the Hohenzollern monarchy, All those pre-Great War stories gives the reader the background needed to understand the power struggle between Europe's nations, struggle that ignited the Great War.

The 1914-1918 Great War triggered everything that came afterward:

-The seizing of power by the Communists in Russia
-The dismemberment of Austro-Hungria
-The rise to power of Adolf Hitler
-The emergence of the USA as a world power
-The creation of a nation called Irak.

The 20th century we know, the terrorist 21st century we are living in all started with the consequence of the Great War.
In essence, to be able to understand the world we are living in, we must be able to understand how it was shaped.
"A world undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918" will help you do that.

Required reading if you ask me. A must book for any library.

World War I may be the biggest tragedy in history. It destroyed a promising civilization and led to the evils of communism and Nazism. "A World Undone" is the best book I have read about this tragedy. The title is apt. A world was indeed undone. Meyer describes that world and how its faults AND its strengths led to the tragedy. For example, virtues such as courage, perseverance and planning many times made things worse.

Meyer describes the privations on the home fronts. The situation in Germany is especially interesting, as we get little of that in most of the histories I have read.

I found most interesting descriptions of interactions among leaders, military and civilian. There was plenty of incompetence and short sightedness, but there were also rational and well-thought out plans that just didn't work, perhaps because both sides were similarly matched and both sides were thinking of moves and counter moves. Meyer does a good job of talking about all sides. This is a useful antidote to one-sided accounts we often get. When I say "one-sided" I am not talking about only or even mostly patriotic accounts. Rather, it is a big mistake, often repeated, to treat the other side as an object on which we apply our best efforts. Enemies adapt. We learn from each other. It is easy to say "If we did..." This is naive and not pernicious. We and our adversaries share a system in which our common actions invariably produce results neither side could have foreseen.

Viewing all human interactions systemically is a good idea. War, especially a protracted and terrible war like World War I, brings this our in sharper detail, but the complexity and unpredictable nature of human interaction is true always and everywhere. It should be one of the lessons of history and it is what makes reading books like "A World Undone" more than an academic exercise.

Others have written if there is one book you read ... I don't think it is ever a good idea to read just one book about anything, but this one would be a good start. I have thought long about the question of whether historian create history or just report it. It is clear that some creation is going on, as authors must make sense of events and put them in a context that is the creation of the historian and his/her culture. A book like this is possible only in the post-Cold War environment, where we can better see the complexity of multiple relationships.

America has ordered the world as long as most of us have been alive. We have trouble understanding the world of 1914, when was no dominant power. Our world might be becoming more like that of 1914. I hope we do better this time.

I have read numerous books on the Great War and I found this book used too many of the cliches of 1960's Great War historians. The whole "lions led by donkeys" issue is played up way too much. (attributing the quote to Ludendorff when most historians now figure it was just made up) For example Meyer on several occasions blast generals for pushing on despite losses and then sites other examples of the donkey generals giving up just when victory was at hand. You can't have it both ways. A good overview of the war but it seems to have not relied sufficiently enough on more recent historical analysis of the war.

I probably shouldn't have read this right after reading Tuchman's great classic. The writing styles just don't compare. I found "A World Undone" to be a plodding, if knowledgeable read. You learn facts in great detail and I'm sure any decent college student could complete the book and answer the usual checklists; causes of war, dates, timetables, significant individuals, consequences of war etc. But it was certainly no page turner for me, and at 700 or so pages that's a whole lot of tedium.

Really good general histories of World War I (actually, I almost prefer to call it the Great War, since its historical impact was much more profound than that of World War II) are rather thin on the ground. John Keegan's THE FIRST WORLD WAR is excellent but focuses primarily on military strategy. Meyer, by contrast, presents an "integrated" history, interspersing year-by-year coverage of the major campaigns with "Background" chapters that provide invaluable social, cultural, and political information about the WWI era. In a lesser author's hands, this might have made the narrative choppy, but instead it flows quite smoothly. Meyer is so thorough that his major omissions -- a perfunctory discussion of the war at sea, very little coverage of action beyond the Western and Eastern European fronts, and, most annoyingly, the lack of a sufficient number of maps -- are somewhat difficult to understand. Here is where a sharp-eyed editor might have improved the book. Despite the unfortunate gaps, I heartily recommend this volume as a good starting point for those interested in learning more about this great tragedy in human history.

I am really enjoying this book. Its amazing that so much gets covered in a reasonable length (and the book is still 700+ pages!)

The book's greatest strength is that it is very easy to read; not perfect, as there are the odd clunker and poorly phrased passages.

It reminds me of a very entertaining university lecture. The lecturer covers the topics which are most important, tries to summarize them for easy comprehension, and leaves to you the much more detailed reading list if you want to know more.

Trust me, my grad school days are long over. I still enjoy reading academic research and checking citations, but a lot less these days. This book makes learning about the Great War an easy task, while covering LOTS of ground.

For this it should be recommended.

This book is an in depth and entertaining examination of World War I, its causes, the nations and personalities involved. The background of the nations and personalities really gave me an insight that I had not had before nor read in other books on the subject. I also felt that the author made an effort to be as unbiased as possible.

I had no idea that heirs to the Ottoman throne were kept imprisoned and terribly treated until crowned. Or that one of the greatest French socialists and great hope for peace was assassinated right before the hostilities started. Or that the English were more concerned about Ireland and the war came as almost a surprise to its citizens. and so on.

The reader of this audio cd was also superb. An audio book can be ruined by a poor reader, this book benefits from its reading.

This tremendously captivating and endlessly insightful history of World War I is extremely well written, organized and illustrated.

Human folly played a major role in the igniting the war and sustaining it for four long and brutal years. Unlike the majority of World War I histories, "A World Undone" focuses on the personalities and societies which waged total war against each other from 1914 to 1918. The Great War killed tens of millions of soldiers and civilians alike and left Europe and the economies of the major powers in ruin. Yes, the French, British, Russians and Americans feature prominently, but, to Meyer's credit, so do the Austro-Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Serbs, Turks and many, many others.

Meyer's history alternates chapters on the war with background material, which provide greater resolution on a number of issues, ranging from the machinery of death to cossacks and poetry. The result is a comprehensive and elegant single volume history of the war.

There is a great deal of interesting information here that readers will not find in most World War I histories. For example, some 100,000 Jews (out of a total Jewish population of 600,000) served in the armies of Imperial Germany in the First World War and 12,000 died fighting for their country.

Unlike many historians, Meyers also details the great successes of the Russian Imperial Army early in the war, which diverted German forces to the Eastern Front and played a major role in the ability of the Allies to stop the Germans at the Marne and elsewhere. Of particular interest are the Brusilov Offensives of 1916, which shattered the Austro-Hungarian armies on the Eastern Front, forcing the Germans to assume responsibility for the entire war in the East.

Finally, Meyer shows, in his chapter on the extremely harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the fighting on the Eastern Front, that it was the Germans themselves who sowed the seeds for the equally harsh Treaty of Versailles ending World War I. Meyer calls Brest-Litovsk, which transferred a third of the Russian Empires population to Imperial Germany, "one of the most punitive peace treaties in history."

This excellent single volume history is recommended for those interested in a compelling and uniquely informative account of The Great War.

I have always wanted to know more than the rudimentary basics taught in classes about WWI. This book came as a very welcome surprise. In spite of its length (over 700 pp), it's immensely readable. I came to especially appreciate the "background" pieces that followed every chapter, since they gave a much needed glimpse into the make up of European Powers before the war. What I really liked about it also, is its "humanness". The book deals honestly with the precursors of war and does not shy away from asigning blame where it belongs...Not only on German shoulders as most historians are want to do. I do not believe that a certain nation is born evil, or that an Englishman or a German would react very differently when faced with the horrors of war. Proof: The Christmas impromptu "armistice", the ocassions on which German soldiers stopping their artillery fire when faced with the carnage of their ennemy that came to be due to the reckless policy of "l'Offensive a l'outrance" much favoured by French Generals, or even when German or Russian soldiers stepped out of their trenches to help the ennemy gather their dead and wounded.
To the extent that history seems to repeat itself in a vicious circle of flagrant lies and self-aggrandizing illusions, I found much of the analysis of the propaganda campaigns and political agendas on both sides to be a "copy cat" of later or more recent campaigns against the "evil forces that threaten civilization", campaigns that only serve to alienate and radicalize whole populations.
In just 700 pages (!!), the author has magnificiently drawn a pathetic tableau of what the tragedy of WWI wrought both at the front and in the homeland of the belligerent nations: huge human losses, death of civilizations from starvation and disease (not to mention bombings),financial ruin, desintegration of empires...and a peace that planted the seeds of every major calamity in the 20th century from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Balkan Wars...but also WWII!!! God, what a waste...9 million men dead, whole countries laid to wast and a peace so bitter it was ruptured only 20 years later.
In my humble opinion, the greatest winner of the Great War is Turkey (I'm not Turkish, though!)...but to quote the author "that is another story". I can say nothing but wonderful, wonderful things about this book which I intend to follow with either "A Shattered Peace" or a book on WWI in the Middle East. Nevertheless, one thing I have to signal is that a photo of a Turkish General was wrongly attributed to Ataturk. That's it!
To all history buffs who are contemplating reading this book, I say: "A l'attaque!". You will not regret it!

Before Hitler, Stalin, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, there was the "Great War"--the war to end all wars, World War 1. Diminished by time, by the characters and events of its even more horrific sequel, and the collective amnesia we inevitably suffer as a trauma--no matter how scarring--fades with time, World War 1 is largely forgotten and if its thought of at all, its often vaguely--a kind of faded relic symbolic of some bygone, simpler, and still idealistic age. When in fact World War 1 all but killed idealism outright in what was to that point four years of the most appalling and sustained slaughter in human history.

G.J. Meyer's *A World Undone* is a vivid reminder of how the Great War forever changed civilization--and how it very nearly destroyed it altogether. Some, in fact, would say that it did.

It's hard to imagine that a better one-volume history of World War 1 exists than this one. From the historical and political situation at the time of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist group to the signing of the Versailles Treaty which planted the poisoned seeds of World War 2, *A World Undone* provides the reader with a complete picture of the war--its causes, its battles, and its key personalities both in the trenches and behind the scenes.

Meyer's breathes life into his history and the war as he recounts it unfolds with all the pathos and drama of an epic novel--a tragedy in which everything that could possibly go wrong did and even those with the best of intentions seemed destined to make the most disastrous of choices. Of course, not everyone had the best of intentions. Here is the opportunistic jockeying of politicians and generals for fame and power as soldiers are butchered by the hundreds of thousands and civilian populations starve. Here is the stupidity and stubbornness that ordered an entire generation of young men straight into solid waves of machine gun fire because military strategy had yet to catch up with the new technology of death. Here is the nightmare of life in the elaborate networks of tunnels and trenches that soldiers shared with corpses, rats, and disease. Photographs embedded throughout the text help the reader put faces to the names of a large cast of characters and special "background" sections provide fascinating sidebar information and human interest pieces on everything from Lawrence of Arabia to the Ottoman Empire that entertain and illuminate.

Meyer wrote that his aim was to provide a World War 1 history that didn't assume the reader was already in possession of the historical currents converging in 1914 that made an assassin's pistol the starter's gun for a world war. Instead Meyer's intention was to take nothing for granted and to provide the reader with as complete and coherent picture as possible of a very complex time. In that he has succeeded without reservation. If you intend on reading only one book about the Great War, this would be the one book to read. Chances are, though, *A World Undone* will cause you to want to read further about the seminal disaster that inaugurates modern history--and whose aftershocks shake our still undone world today.

There are many writers out there who follow wars like they are creatures of good, of reason...like there is something glorious in going to war for the right reasons, for the right outcomes. Meyer exposes WWI for the fiasco it was, showing almost all countries and individuals responsible for creating this war as being reprehensible in their behaviours. The wanton destruction of life continues to be inexcusable, and in this book, all of the world-wide catastrophic loss of life, homes, and cultures are documented. Meyer does an excellent job of bringing together in one volume the important occurences that led up to the war, the battles, the personalities that made the decisions to continue the war, and how the war ultimately impacted culture throughout the world. Such a big event is hard to coalesce into one book, and as Meyer states, no one has attempted it before. But his writing and research is a big boon to readers who weary of trying to find a book that can explain all this.

Our world is nearly one hundred years removed from this war. We've had time to dwell on the mistakes made and the courage shown by all the young men on all fronts who were involved. The astronomical numbers of men sent to the front and used for cannon fodder on all sides just blows my mind away. Unfortunately, the same stupid reasoning and excuses are still at play in the wars in our current world. As George Santayana stated "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." We may not see the number of young men and civilians lost to the crimes of all wars seen in WWI, but they continue to harrow up the soul and make spirits mourn for potential not seen.

Karen L. Sadler

I feel that I got exactly what I wanted from this book and why I ordered it from the store.com: A good clear overview of the history of the causes of WWI, the conduct of the war, the major fronts and battles, and the immediate aftermath of the war. All was not clear sailing at first, however. The reader should be aware that this book is a bit like a Shakespeare play: Difficult to figure out what's going on at first but soon becomes enthralling. Once hostilities start there are so many events, battles, names, maneuvers, and so on that it is almost impossible to keep it straight and have an overview of what is happening where. Of course, even the generals in command of the divisions at the front had no better idea of what was going on and probably less of a clear picture than the reader of Meyer's book does. Nevertheless I believe that no one could have done a better job of pulling all this together in one volume than G.J. Meyer has done. The author is to be congratulated for elegantly accomplishing a seemingly impossible task. (I found that referring to wikepedia and other sources on the internet for maps, photos, and videos, and more detailed explanations in some cases was very helpful.)

Meyer writes straightforwardly, interestingly, and develops the history of The Great War sequentially. He weaves the political events, military events on various fronts, and some social and cultural events seamlessly and with surprising ease. Once I got along in the book I found it gripping, fascinating, and hard to put down. Meyer includes helpful background sections after each chapter. These background sections explain in easy detail matters that the reader would find interesting but are not directly involved in the march of events; for example, the history of the Hohenzollern family, the development of the tank, the effect of the war on literature, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. I appreciated these background sections and learned a lot from them.

Meyer has not done original research in archives and secret sources for this book, rather he is compiling, summarizing, and explaining what other more specialized historians have already done. Unless you want to read the many dozens of books in the biblio you should read Meyer's book, and even if you do want to read the many dozens of more detailed histories of aspects of WWI, you should still read Meyer's book first. Each chapter has helpful notes and suggestions for further reading.

Here is the very BIG PICTURE that I came away with: World War I was caused by Germany's desire to rule continental Europe. Germany never had a prayer of winning the war unless they won it very quickly, because of lack of resources and ultimately manpower. By 1915 Germany's situation was already hopeless. They had better troops, generals, equipment than the French, British, and other allies but were suffering from the blockade and were being exhausted by a multiple front war and their hapless allies such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The final end was precipitated by the arrival in Europe of over a million American troops in support of the Allies. Germany was crushed by the vastly superior resources of the Allies. World War II both in Europe and the Pacific, the Cold War, and even our current problems in the Middle East, not to mention the entire cultural milieu since 1918, are a direct result of events involved in The Great War and its immediate aftermath.

Terrific. Meyer writes with the skill of a novelist, and I can't remember learning as much from one WWI book as I did from this one. I never realized, for example, how quickly Austria had exhausted itself and left Germany to carry the Central Powers for the last three years of the war. Nor did I know that the Archduke's wife was also killed in the infamous 1914 assassination that pushed Eruope into what the author dubs "the abyss." Those who like battles and leaders history should like A World Undone. Meyer takes a top-down approach, examining the war almost exclusively from the perspective of politicians and generals. Testimony from the "common soldier" is infrequent. Meyer overcomes the temptation to include "mud, blood, and bombs" quotations that are too often cited in WWI studies. The book does not break any new ground in using primary sources, but Meyer's command of the secondary literature is masterful. A World Undone is narrative history at its best, though the author inserts mini-chapters between the chapters that sometimes take us across time. Some of these chapters work well, others, I felt, interrupted the flow of the narrative. These small chapters usually provide biographical material about one of the main subjects (General Ludendorff, Kaiser Wilhelm, or Nicholas II) or are simply an aside (as in the case of T.E. Lawrence). Some mini-chapters are fascinating, such as the one about the sultans of the Ottoman Empire (who were cruel and decadent beyond belief) and the Romanovs. Oddly, the most moving pages of the book might deal with the lonely, overworked Eric Ludendorff. Others, such as the chapter about women and the Armenian genocide, don't add much--they are well intentioned, but feel tacked on. For the most part, the book is very well paced, though I thought it took too long getting to the actual war (a problem William C. Davis's "Look Away!" also had). On the whole, however, Meyer has written an excellent book. He is fair toward his human subjects while also conveying the stupidity and tragedy of the Great War. He balances the Eastern and Western theaters well, too, and he achieves an excellent balance between providing detail without confusing or overwhelming the reader. Those who have never read about WWI will like it, but so should those who have read about it many times before.

The first chapter of the book "A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918" by G.J. Meyer begins with a detailed narrative of that fateful date in Sarejevo when an Austrian archduke and his wife are gunned down by a nineteen year-old Serbian nationalist. I was alarmed when I realized that this entire chapter was strikingly identical to the first chapter of Edmond Taylor's "The Fall of the Dynasties, 1905-1922", which is one of my favorite but an oft-overlooked work of the time period. Thus, I was not surprised when I turned to Meyer's bibliography and found Taylor's work cited as a source for this chapter. At that point, I was fearful that "A World Undone" was going to be nothing more than a pitiful mashing of previous historical works relating to the time period (similar to Joseph Persico's "Eleventh Hour, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Month.")

Despite the frequency of texts throughout Meyer's book with stark similarity to existing literature, "A World Undone" does have several redeeming qualities. The author does provide some analyses that deviate from the status quo, such as depicting Moltke the younger as the executor of an impossibly doomed Schleiffen Plan rather than the meddler who transformed an intrinsic path towards victory into defeat. Meyer also balances the traditional views of the Great War with contemporary accounts that have emerged in the last decade, such as his acknowledgement of the Entente's self-delusion that Germany's casualties were substantially greater than their own, when in fact the opposite was true (as cited by John Mosier's "The Myth of the Great War").

In spite of the original analyses and acceptance of theses from contemporary historians, no quality of Meyer's book distinguishes it more than the fact that it is an overview of the entire Great War written not as a study but as a story. The Great War already has some great studies of the war, such as works by A.J.P. Taylor or a recent one by John Keegan, but Meyer manages to retell the events of the Great War as they occurred without completely seperating them from the happenings occuring on other fronts or other theaters at the time. Studies of the Great War may note that the Battle of the Somme began and ended while the latter half of the Battle of Verdun was raging, but such works usually discuss them individually and thus extract them from other occurances at the time period. In Meyer's account, however, it is much easier for the reader to perceive that the fighting in the Somme, at Verdun, or in Galicia occurred simultaneously in 1916 rather than individually.

For novices on the subject of the Great War, Meyer's "Background" sections to subjects relating to the Great War add a significant amount of depth to the conflict. However, I was disappointed that "A World Undone" gave little more than a passing mention to battles beyond Europe or the Middle East, such as ignoring the successful resistance of Lettow-Vorbeck's askari soldiers in German East Africa beyond the armistice. Indeed, the ommission or bare-mention of the fighting in Africa, Asia, and on the seas beyond Europe may cause those new to the subject to wonder if the Great War was indeed a "world war" or nothing more than a massive European calamity.

Furthermore, I found past classical works relating to the war (e.g. Tuchman's "The Guns Of August", Hornes' "The Price of Glory", Taylor's "The Fall of the Dynasties"--all cited by Meyer) to be generally more eloquently written (but often less broad in scope), while the analyses provided by AJP Taylor and John Keegan in their respective works to be more thorough.

Although "A World Undone" is not the definitive work of the war that has produced some our best nonfiction and fiction literature, it should by no means be ignored by students of that conflict.

In his introduction, the author states "It has long seemed to me that practically all popular histories of the Great War assume too much, expect too much of the reader, and therefore leave too much unexplained."
He further states, "My final objective, and not the least of my objectives, has been to offer this story in the most readable form possible and thereby to do justice to its inherent drama." The author has more than meet his goals here, much more. This is one of the most readable accounts of the First World War I have read (and there have been many, many of those). The author's style is smooth, his research very accurate and detailed and he has been able to cram a surprisingly large amount of information in to a relatively small volume (small when compaired to many others now setting on my shelf). The author examens the root causes of the war and addresses this complex situation quite well in a comprehensive manner. For those of you that are familiar with the situation or situations that exsisted at that time, you will know that is is no easy matter! The author has followed developments step by step and organized his material in a way that is actually easy to follow and is far from boring. Even though the author does use body counts and statistics throughout the book, he pulls this off in a way that you actually understand the horror of the situation, what price the people paid then, and what price we are still paying to this very day. Now I will admit that there are many books out there with more detail...for goodness sakes, there are volumes and volumes written about each and every single battle in this conflict that started in 1914 and did not end until 1918. This is probably one of the most written about events in human history. But dispite those many tombs, few, if any, clarify the situations such as this author has done. For those interest in further study, more details, more statistics, there are certainly a lot of fields out there to plow. I have to agree with the reviewer that stated that if you only read one book on this war, this would be the one you should choose. I also like the way the illustrations, photos and maps were spread throughout the book rather than into one, two or there sections. I highly recommend this work and further recommend you add it to your library as you will no doubt want to give it a reread at a later date. Thank you Mr. Meyer!

Author does great job showing what happened from beginning to end of WWI. He explains the causes and motivations, and best of all the idiocy of most of the military leaders who tried to fight an 18th Century style war with cavalry and marching bands getting mowed down by artillery and machine guns, and being stupid enough to do it again and again. He shows how hellish it was to be a front line enlisted man or officer, who suffered horrendous casualty rates.
I tried reading Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, but she gets so bogged down in details, such as every official who attended some cabinet meeting, and alternative plans discussed and discarded, and she only covers the first year or so.
I also liked Max Hastings' book, Catastrophe.

A World Undone is a single volume history of WWI and it’s excellent. For a first time reader of the history or a veteran reader of this period of history it is well worth your time. The idea of WWI brings up images of trench warfare, slaughter and little movement over years—i.e. boring. G.J. Meyer manages to overcome this. The work flows and even battles that essentially lead nowhere are interesting from the perspective he uses. He explains, without burdensome details, just where things went wrong and what the thinking was at the time.
Mr. Meyer has done his research so that even the reader familiar with WWI will find information about major events and movements that other historians fail to present. Overall this is probably the best single volume history of World War I written to date.

I will keep it short as others have said most of what I would or could anyway. Buy this book if you are looking for an engagingly written fairly comprehensive overview style account of the first World War. I listened on audible (which I can also heartily recommend) and never found it tedious and I learned/retained quite a bit even now several months after finishing the book. An easy 5/5 stars!

Unlike most books on the "Great War" Meyer doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the battles as much as he spends describing what led up to the battles and their effects on the war overall. He has split the book into six sections; a prelude and one then for each year of the war. Interesting that each section is 100 pages (more or less) but he doesn't skimp on his writing. It is succinct and straightforward without being boring.

One of the better parts of the book is the background sections that are added after almost every chapter. They add a color and deeper understanding as to the motivation of some of the bigger players as well as added an additional layer of explanation as to why certain actions happened an why some of them were unavoidable.

Meyer doesn't pull punches on any of the players, those that he thinks were mostly self-serving (especially Haig, Mangin and Ludendorf) he tells us why. Those who were self-effacing he will explain their background and why they were that way. In the end he does a great service by zeroing in on the multiple failures of the Generals to understand how the new weapons of war (especially machine guns) had changed the rules of war.

Why did armies on the western front continue to charge directly at each other and lose men at an unbelievable rate without gaining anything of value? Because the Generals spent most of their time sitting in villas fantasizing about refighting the Napoleonic Wars (Haig especially wanted a breakthough where he could use the Cavalry); they never saw the conditions under which soldiers had to fight under (except maybe for Petain). They would develop grandiose plans that took in neither the weather nor the landscape. More than anything they worried about how they were viewed by their peers and not about what they were trying to accomplish.

Absolutely outstanding.

This book, unlike the myriad others that I have read on the subject--with some being quite good themselves--endeavors to explain the what and why. What was in their heads, and why they did the things they did. My only, exceedingly minor complaint is that the book doesn't dig very far into the head of the common man of the time without whose support, nothing could've happened.

That aside, my admiration for G.J. Meyer's accomplishment is without boundaries. He's taken one of the most complex events in human history and shed light on it like no other author that I know of. The insights and brief histories of all the participants are invaluable in understanding of the conditions and political climate that led to the European catastrophe. Even if you're not interested in the subject, the first 150 pages are startlingly relevant in today's world.

I sincerely hope that Mr. Meyer will do the world a favor and tackle some of the other tough nuts of history.

I've been trying for several years to get a feel for WWI. I've tried Keegan and Strachan but bogged down in the first couple of chapters. I finished John Ramsden's Modern Scholar lecture series on the subject. Finally, with this book I get it. He weaves all the pieces together into a coherent narrative. This is what's needed for a beginner like me, not a theory of the war (makes no sense to me when I don't understand the events the theory attempts to explain) but a story that makes sense. He spoon feeds you the necessary geography, politics, royal dynasties and so forth. He goes into the biography of key players so that psychological and emotional motivations of individuals become clear. The details about von Ludendorf and Petain for example are fascinating. The audiobook version of this book is extremely well done and easy to absorb.

I've been a WW2 buff forever, but there was always a huge hole in my knowledge of WW1 (The Great War). This book achieves its purpose, which is to give a detailed yet not exhaustive account of the war, its background, and its repercussions. A perfect tome for someone who wants an introductory history of the conflict. Meyer does a great job of describing the war as a sequential series of events, and smartly adds "Background" chapters before and after important milestones to further establish context. After reading, it is apparent that WW1 and WW2 were really one single conflict separated by a generation-long period of "peace" - contextually, it is impossible to separate the two. If I had to pick a single event that ushered in the "modern" world, it would have to be The Great War. All existing geopolitics evolved from it.

As an esthusiast of World War Two history, and having published two historical novels set in that war, I have naturally been longing for a comprehensive text on the war's origins. Meyer's work is exactly what I've been searching for. It is comprehensive beyond anything one might contemplate, yet extremely readable and captivating. Meyer does a masterful job of weaving all the parts together in a way that makes this incredibly perplexing conflict understandable to a non-historian like me. The treatment of all the key players is especially well done. Like characters in a good novel, the reader will come to care about what happens to them - even the supposed villians - and find the book hard to put down. This is a must read for anyone even remotely interested in understanding the dynamics of world history in the twentieth century.
Douglas W. Jacobson
Author,
The Katyn Order
Night Of Flames

I agree with the other helpful reviewers: This is a great text for learning about the major points of the war in a relatively concise way. The book is well-written, though it is certainly not great literature like the Guns of August, nor is it particularly scholarly. It really is a wide-ranging, straightforward account of WWI.

The books strengths are in the who, what, when, where, and how. The weakness, as is to be expected in a book of this type, is the "why". This is not a scholarly work presenting theories about why certain things happened. It is a synthesis of other works, and thus treads lightly in the area of attempting explanations. In those cases where explanations are offered, they are generally the conventional wisdom, and do not always come off as particularly credible.

The book is highly readable, and well-tailored for a shorter attention span. The narrative of the action flows well, and that narrative is broken up periodically by background sections that provide greater detail about important topics not directly related to the unfolding action on the battlefields.

I certainly recommend this text, though I have not read any of the other similar survey texts, so I cannot provide a comparison.

Meyer's A World Undone is a highly recommended book for those who are just getting initiated in learning about the nature and history of the First World War. His narrative is riveting throughout, with background sections after each chapter, which I think are very useful. The title of this book I think very aptly sums up the events between 1914-1918. Virtually all the major powers of Europe and some from beyond became entangled in this killing machine that claimed the lives of millions and laid the seeds for future death and destruction.

This is not necessarily a new and original account of that war, but rather a more fluid and readable account than perhaps other more scholarly books. You never get too bogged down in military tactics and movements or likewise thrown into political and diplomatic maneuvering, though these aspects are given rightful attention. Meyer doesn't use footnotes in the actual body of the text; he cites his sources at the end. This has it's advantages and disadvantages. He also seems to rely on secondary sources, but as mentioned, this isn't meant to be a revisionist account or a scholarly account incorporating a wide array of recently uncovered primary sources and etc.

What really came through to me was this notion referred to as the `cult of the offensive', i.e., the belief that a major attack by either the allied or central powers' armies, even against entrenched, seemingly impregnable defenses, would bring immediately decisive results or victory. But what struck me the most was the number of casualties incurred from these offensive battles such as the Somme and others along the Western Front especially, though the results from the Eastern Front were just as horrendous in many instances. It didn't seem to matter how many thousands of men died, or even if the attack failed, they still planned for further attacks (and I'm mainly concerned with the British and French leaders here). There were a few commanders who were more scrupulous with the lives of their men, commanders like Petain for example, but this blind faith in offensive tactics that resulted in such horrific casualty figures never deterred the disciples of this offensive style.

Meyer offers illuminating portraits of some of the major political and military leaders, especially with figures like chief German strategist and near dictator Erich von Ludendorff and Kaiser Wilhelm II from the Central Powers to figures ranging from British General Douglas Haig and Tsar Nicholas on the Entente side, but many others from both sides are given ample attention as well. The ordeals endured by the common soldier come through powerfully and poignantly, as does the state of the home front on both sides as the war continued and the hardships increased (though not on the same scale for all countries).

Another thing I came away with after reading this book, was just how powerful Germany had become as a nation. Think on this, Germany was confronting several great powers and for a while was fighting on two fronts. Yet for all this, they managed to keep the fight on their opponents turf and not their own. Quite impressive to say the least.

The end of the war is briefly covered, not with great depth. I think overall this was a great book. This particular topic can not be covered in one volume and like any other subject in history, one should consult multiple sources to become better educated on an event of this magnitude. But the common denominator I found in this book and others on World War I was how so many leaders stumbled into a conflict that should not have happened.

If only every history book was written by G.J. Meyer! 'A World Undone' is a fantastic read; I could not have imagined a single book could paint such a thorough picture of the Great War. I could not put this book down.

I have read other volumes, including 'The First World War', 'The Guns of August', even 'World War One For Dummies'! But this is the absolute best of the lot, providing background history on the major players and combatants, and numerous glimpses into the personal lives of the leaders and soldiers of the day. It is these 'background essays' that make this history so much more enjoyable, so much more readable, that I was very disappointed when I came to the end. Most history books leave you needing a break, but 'A World Undone' left me wishing for a second volume.

If you are like me, you have a pretty good knowledge of World War II because parents or grandparents were involved in it...and something like that gets conveyed in many ways within one's family culture.

World War I - well, not so much. However, the first world war was really the beginning of the modern world as we know it and also quite definitely the end of the world that was set up after the Napoleanic wars in the early 1800s.

This book is a short and well written introductory history of that first world war that gives a quick understanding of the immense blood shed and world shattering events that marked the years leading up to the war, the war years themselves, and the bitter peace that really resolved very little (but laid the groundwork for yet another world war twenty years later.)

Amazing and horrifying facts ensue with fascinating regularity. If you are unfamiliar with the history of this war, this book will definitely give you a great beginning background of the most relevant details.

I recommend this book highly.

And I really mean ALL readers. I've always been a history buff, but I have to say that sometimes I can be "all girl" when it comes to war stuff because it usually tends to be so laden with battle tactics and dry statistics...

This book manages to give that indepth analysis & background on the Great War in a way that is easily readable & understandable. It describes the players & their interrelationships & intrigues, provides indepth background on political & historical ties and subsequent stakes throughout the war, AND describes the military campaigns and resulting changes to the landscape across Europe. I can't put the book down. I'm almost done with it & I'm sorry I am! It's that good.

Kudos to the author for writing the book that I've been searching so long to find!

I have read many of the major WWI books written in recent years, and this is the best single volume history I have found.

Nice balance between battle-field, home-front, politics, personalities, diplomacy, economics, and history.
Interspersed every few chapters, are dedicated chapters that take a deep dive into the context of the conflict. For example, fascinating histories of the German and Austrian royal families… plus a great profile of Ottoman sultans.

You will NOT find the nitty-gritty of trench life and shell-by-shell of individual battles… but there are plenty of other books that cover you can read…. But this particular book is a must read.

I have been studying World War I for nearly 40 years, and have read a good number of overview books on the war. This is one of the better ones.

The author has also done considerable reading on this war, but always felt something was missing. He set out to correct that in this book. The result is not a "complete" history, but his view of what is important to the modern reader.

The format of the book is generally a narrative chapter on the progress of the war, followed by one on background. The narrative chapters mainly discuss the war in Europe, and the focus there is the western front. This is not the book to go to if you want a description of the tracing down of the German surface raiders at the start of the war, or even of the details of the action on the Italian front.

The narrative chapters shift between showing the war from the high, strategic concerns, view of generals and politicians and from the front line, full of carnage, view of the common soldier. The author weaves these various viewpoints, as well as his background chapters, together quite well. The book reads very smoothly and quickly for one of 600 pages.

The only negative I would have is that the book could use more maps, though the ones it has are generally well-drawn and informative (though I noted that the front line traces for September 5, 1914 and September 14, 1914 are reversed on that map).

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918Brilliant book, extremely well written. The futility of the majority of the pointless battles is fully exposed here. Far more knowledgable reviewers have explored this book better than I ever could. A real pity Mr. Meyer did'nt treat the Gallipoli campaign with a little more respect for the ANZACS who fought bravely under the abysmal 'leadership' of the English and does'nt mention the abilities of the absolutely brilliant Maj. Gen Sir Andrew Russell in either Turkey or Europe-a far more accomplished leader than those allied Generals covered. Highly recommended all the same.

I wanted to learn more about what precipitated WWI and what happened during the war. The author provides a very in-depth and detailed history, including world events that contributed to the current status of rulers and empires, that satisfied my thirst for knowledge. Well researched and cited, with accompanying maps.

If you had to choose one book to read about WWI to obtain an informative introduction this is it. It is informative, well written and at the same time accessible to those without a large background knowledge of WWI history. Somehow it manages to preserve the scope of the events and not to lose the big picture, as it is often the case with WWI history books.
WWI is comparatively unknown to modern audiences, while the average history buff will know the name of relatively second rank generals from WWII the very broad strokes of WWI are less familiar to most (personally I blame the History Channel for WWII mania). This is a great book to start a reading and familiarization with a war that greatly shaped the history of the world. I would recommend after this to read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman for a more in depth view of the start of the war.
The Guns of August

If you're looking for an excellent history of The Great War or simply a great non-fiction book you've found it. In a nutshell what makes this book work is its balance, not necessarily in its handling of events and personalities - the author has no problem critiquing policies, people and decisions - but in the flow of the narrative. The author does an excellent job jockeying among the battlefields, world capitals, politicians, civilians, soldiers and generals, economies, technologies and much, much more with excellent writing, long and short chapters, (the latter used almost as footnotes to elucidate a point), without becoming bogged down in details or losing track of the narrative. (Just trying to describe how well the author succeeds in doing this is proving difficult.) Without getting too carried away I found the writing and this book very Catton-esque. Highly recommended.

Meyer's work is a good, eminently readable account of the Great War that is a relatively quick read. It avoids getting bogged down in the minutiae of military maneuvers. Unlike Barbara Tuchman's works, he focuses on a limited number of characters. You won't be searching Wikipedia for arcane names every-other-page.

Otherwise, Meyer's work doesn't offer much new to students of WWI. The villains are oft recognized from their appearances in previous accounts of the Great War. The Kaiser, Czar Nicholas II, Haig, Ludendorff, and Joffre make their obligatory appearances as either incompetents, or in the case of Ludendorff, a military genius but political failure. To Meyer, many of these personalities were well meaning, but overwhelmed by events and the enormity of modern warfare.

Where Meyer varies from common themes is seeming to place much of the blame for the immediate start of the war on the Austrians Conrad and Berchtold. Conrad broods for an opportunity to attack Serbia without appreciating enough the Russian threat. Berchtold supports Conrad for selfish, political reasons.

Meyer also apparently feels that peace "feelers" in the later years of the war were sincere and might have saved Germany from a Versailles style capitulation if Ludendorff hadn't so stubbornly clung to his no compromise position vis-a-vis Belgium and parts of occupied France.

For readers new to WWI, Meyer's work offers a well organized overview of events with logical explanations. "A World Undone" makes the complex history of 1914-1918 approachable.

This book is easily the most reader friendly book on WWI - without being simplistic. The intermixture of historical background, actual events and historical analysis renders a perfect blend that will appeal to both academics and beginners.

This book covers the entire war, not just the western front. It is "objective" in the sense that the author does not assign blame - he tries to understand the events by looking at the historical background and the contemporary social, political and military climate. He then presents his analysis to the reader, not telling them "this is how it is", but instead allowing the reader to form his/her own opinion.

Having studied this period extensively on a university level, I've read tons of books on the subject. This is definitely the one that I recommend to anyone looking for a good overview of WWI and the events leading up to it.

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You think of the thousands of books written about The First World War and wonder, "Could anyone possibly have anything new to say about the subject?".

The answer is 'yes'. Meyer's book is refreshing.

The best parts of this book are the short 'Background' pieces that end each chapter. It adds an depth of understanding about the war in short (3-4 pages) bites. If you want to get a good taste of this book, turn to page 419 and read the four page background piece, 'Consuming The Future'. Meyer spells out in a language anyone can understand how the First World War destroyed the economies of all the European powers.

Not only the best WWI book I've read, but one of the best books on any subject I've read in the past 5 years.

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I have to say I'm not done with it yet, I will be in a short while. That said, this is already my favorite WWI book ever written. It doesn't "Only" cover the Western Front. The Western Front, especially here in the USA, is the main focus of books on the War. The Russian revolution gets a big portion of study as well, but in many cases Tannenberg is discussed then the Eastern Front only glossed over until the fall of the Czar. This book covers many parts of the war in detail. It has good background sections on important events and people. It talks of the Macedonian and Romanian fronts as well as the East and of course the West. It is mixed in with soldier stories and political background. It also had good brief histories of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. I think it's a good book for anyone who likes WWI history, or someone just wanting to know more about it.

Prior to reading this book on my Kindle, I had never read any books about WWI. I became interested in the subject as a result of Downton Abbey. This book provided a good overview of key issues that caused the war and affected its outcome, as well as descriptions of troop movements and battles that offered just the right amount of information for a person interested in, but not fascinated by, military history. The section listing and identifying the key players was very useful during reading.

The only drawback to this book is that I found that there were not nearly enough maps. I highly recommend using the various, excellent WWI maps at the Emerson Kent website as a companion to the book. They are are very clear and, in conjunction with the book, enabled me to clearly picture and fully understand the movements of the armies being described.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it to be a good jumping-off point from which to explore more deeply certain topics related to WWI.

I am nearly done reading this great book. This is probably one of the most comprehensive books on WWI. But becuase of its enormous scope, there are details lacking such as in depth discussion of various battles. (I'd reccomend John Keegan's book for more in depth discussion of the battles). However, everything is covered including all the players, all the theaters and the major battles. I particulaly like how the author follows each chapter with a "background" section in which he goes in to details about certain important subjects related to WWI. The book is presented in chronoligical order. I found the book very lengthy and I did not read this as fast as most other books. But it was well written and captivating at times. The author does a good job at "painting pictures" in the reader's mind. For example, when he discusses trench life or a particular general, you will get a picture of what it was like living in the trenches or imagine the general's personailty. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in getting a good, THOROUGH history lesson in WWI.

I have read more than my share of books on the Great War but this one is by far the best single volume history of the war yet. The chapter interludes add a good deal of depth about specific topics that avoid bogging down the main chapters. From the opening political moves after the assassination of the Archduke, through the worst of the fighting in 1915 and 1916, to the breaking of the dawn that was to bring victory, Meyer's book leads the reader through events with both obvious knowledge, gifted prose and a sensitivity that keeps the pages turning.

There are plenty of new books out that cover the fine details of each of the many campaigns but for an excellent overview that is still packed with information "A World Undone" should be at the top of the reading list.

It broke my heart. I've read a 1/2 dozen more books since, all revolving around the same time period. First I went West, then came back to Europe and then started reading about the Middle East, all during this time period. We lost it. Western Civilization has not recovered, nor has it moved past what happened. Everything consuming our Western world comes from the ghosts of this horrible war.

My wife purchased several WWI books for me for Christmas from my the store wish list. This book was extremely well organized and written. It flowed very well and brought out the most significant elements of the war. Some go into great details about the battles, and some of this information is important, but learning what was going on behind the scenes was more significant. I recommend this to anyone who wants an overview of the war and an understanding of the major players in conflict.

A fascinating book and an absolute page turner.

Meyer's book has given me so much better perspective on the first world war and its leaders. And also how it started, why it kept going and how it finished (suddenly).

My son and I parked in a French village last year to watch the Tour De France cyclists race past. Behind the hedge across the road were many thousands of neat grave stones. In our ignorance we were by the Muese river in the centre of the Verdun battlefields. Some 900,000 casualties including close to 300,000 deaths in this region alone.

And in the Champagne district we again had our eyes opened and emotions stirred by the appalling waste of lives.

As an ANZAC my grandfather fought and was gassed in the Somme debacles. My grandmother said he never recovered. And he never talked about it.

Last year at Gallipoli my wife found the etched memorial to her great uncle, Ernest Ingram, at Lone Pine. His body, like so many 22 year olds, 10,000 miles from his home and family was never found. Very somber. We left a cloth poppy against his name that we had brought from his and our home country of New Zealand.

Although Meyer clarifies the rationale of Gallipoli very well into the book I thought that from my previous study of the affairs of that place that he was somewhat inaccurate with his detail and his simplifications of events there.

One discussion that I did not find in the book and had expected was how the countries housed the millions of enemy prisoners both able and disabled.

Audible version is a great listen and very informative.

Meyer has these sections called "Background" which give granular detail to the rest of the story. Theses are very fact filled and explain background to the subtle regional etiologies of the war.

Comprehensive and the most informative read about the Great War.

As an avid history reader - but a relative newcomer to the more detailed events of WW1 I found the book very worthwhile. Nicely weighted between the political and military aspects of the conflict. A good balance between detail, fact and flow. I think there are some benefits to reading "newer" histories of these terrible wars. Contemporary authors have to sift through mounds of info but produce work which relate to our more modernized interests - for better or worse.

A criticism - that I have also seen in some other of the negative reviews - has to do with the Kindle version and the appalling reproduction of maps and diagrams. Given that there is hardly a $ saved on getting the e-version - the store should warn that the pictorial content of the book is not at the level of hard copies.

Meyers descriptions are very good, allowing for reasonable visualization - but the complexities of the front, salients etc are really supported by diagram and maps. If you have an option pick up the hard copy - and continue via review to pressurize the store and Publishing houses to improve Figures or add warnings to their electronic copies.

The chapters describing how a battle unfolded and how the plans for that battle often changed leading to needless deaths in the thousands was explained well and in detail.

The chapters between the battles explaining individual leaders or movements really brought more light to a little understood moment in world history. If you wish to know anything about the Great War, this book is the book to begin that journey with.

Absolutely fantastic overview of the Great War. It goes through the whole conflict including the historical background of the major players and powers. The only thing I can criticize is that the last chapter on the consequences of the war could have been more in depth.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. . At times, a little too detailed (hence the 4 stars), but other than that, a very enjoyable read. I have read many books on WW2, but not that much on WW1. Reading this book, made me want to read more on WW1. If order to understand the politics and the thinking of WW2, You have to be able to understand the politics and thinking of WW1. This book provides that and the reader will have a greater understanding of the "roadmap" that was built from this war and how it helped to shape WW2

For those who want a no-nonsense, down to the detail account of the causes and outcomes of World War I, this book might not be for you. Instead, you should consider reading Tuchmann's Guns of August 1914. For those of you who want an overview of the war, the battles, and the people who fought and is told from a story teller, this book is for you. Moreover, that is the stated goal of G.J. Meyer in writing this book.

At first glance, one might balk at the length of this book. Do not be scared of the length. Meyer makes great effort in keeping the chapters short, and his writing style is more suited for fiction than history. That is, he knows how to keep the reader interested and the story moving. I especially liked his "Background" sections that presented some historical context to the characters involved.

My only complaint with this book is Meyer's treatment of Kaiser Wilhelm. History has been decidedly unkind to this man, and historians often present him as a highly arrogant and somewhat devious man who wanted, if not demanded, that the Austrians attack Serbia in response to Archduke Ferdinand's assassination. Most historians note Wilhelm's massive inferiority complex toward the British as the real causus belli of WWI. Meyer, however, really softens this view. He present Wilhelm as a passive and weak character, as more of a sympathetic and confused ruler. I simply do not agree with this portrayal.

On the whole, however, this is a very enjoyable read. To cover all 4 years of the war in one easy to read book is an admirable achievement. We still live in a world that is suffering the consequences of the Great War. Look no further than Iraq to see the legacy of this war. What would the world be like today if Wilson had been more insistent?

A World Undone tackles the formidable task of being a single volume history of the Great War, and there, perhaps is its shortcoming. The author does many things extremely well but there is such a huge amount of information crammed into 600 pages that it becomes numbing at times. Battles become reduced to redundant and repetitive recapping of foolish strategy and body counts. So much time, and effort is put into laying the ground work and the early years (and extremely effectively) that the last two years are covered in a whoosh of data. The US role in the war, its tipping point, is covered in a scant 40 pages.

Also, I found some of Meyer's interpretations strange--he keeps emphasizing Germany was the last of the continental powers to mobilize, as though that were an indication of its reluctance. In fact, Germany was so prepared for war it could afford to be last, having spent a generation preparing for the event. Even with these minor issues (and a very strange chapter comparing cossacks to cowboys) there is much much more to compliment than to complain about. The events that lead up to war are put into the important context of declining empires--the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian--trying to stave off irrelevance. The decay of the former leads to a free for all among more stable powers looking to grab a piece of whatever they can. England's reluctance to join in--one can't help but wonder what would have happened if the Germans hadn't violated Belgium's neutrality--is a stark contrast to France, Germany and A-H who are aching to get at.

And get at it they do. The human waste and carnage is numbingly (and I do mean numbingly) detailed. It is thorough and accurate but, like our own Civil War becomes too awful to compute in emotional terms. Indeed, AWU is most effective when it departs briefly from the battlefields and focuses on the letters from the front, or in one particularly moving chapter, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, whose "Dulce es decorum" is a gut-wrenching damnation of the three years he has spent in the trenches. Indeed, the poem reminded me that the most moving anti-war books are not histories, but novels like All Quiet On The Western Front and A Long Long Way which depict the horror of The Great War more effectively than any work of scholarship.

Chapters on the use of propaganda-- how each country became so ensnared in its distortions and lies that peace became impossible--and the role of woman, or the changing face of labor are all fascinating. Personally I wish these areas had been expanded upon and less repetition of the dumb general-dumb decision formula that blighted so much of the conflict.

Regardless of the complaints--A World Undone is an excellent read, and completely worthwhile. It may just be that the author bit off a bit more than could be handled in one volume.

I generally read historical fiction or historical books. I have read a number of books on World War one and "The World Undone" is a very good one especially if you are looking for a book that has enough detail to satisfy an urge to learn about the topic without getting bogged down. The book is well written, easy to read and with very useful backgroud chapters on such things as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman empire and so forth. These background chapters were well placed, provided context that was relevant and made the book that much more enjoyable. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in this topic or in history in general.

Really it is. This book was everything I hoped it would be. I bought it because of other customers' reviews and I wasn't disappointed. The most important aspect for me when reading history books like this, is that the author is a good writer that understands how to keep the reader interested, and Meyer excels at this. To avoid monotonously talking about failed offensive after failed offensive, Meyer incorporates "side chapters" where he gives background information on many different topics such as a short history leading up to the war on the countries involved, how warfare was conducted at the time, leading personalities, and the side effects of the war. Meyer covers the political, economic, and social effects of the war and how these aspects in turn affected the war. What I like best about it is how Meyer maintains a tension by pointing out all the close calls and blunders that could have turned the war in a different direction. This really gives the reader a sense of what was going wrong and why, and what it was like for the parties invovled. If you are interested in in WWI, you've found the only book you'll need.

Great overall history of the first world war. The author accomplishes his goals as stated in the introduction. I would like to have seen some of the major battles fleshed out some more, but besides that, it was a great read. Would recommend the print version of this. I bought the audiable version. With the high turnover rate in senior commanders, and switching from front to front to keep all events synched, i think i the print version would be easier to follow. otherwise, good narration on the audiable version.

I've read dozens of books about WWI, and I no longer expect to learn much when I read the next one. I keep reading them anyway. I don't know why. Maybe because there are always a few details or quotes or facts that are new. This book, however, plays out like drama. The writing is clear and forceful. AND I learned a bunch ... I loved the author's choice to pull out each major country into its own chapter, providing history and context ... and more drama.

Also, doesn't it seem like the tide is turning away from "Germany and Austria-Hungary essentially started the war" to "Russia was really the worst offender, followed by France?"

Interesting how history keeps changing....

The strengths of this book are readability and clarity, and completeness in its overview of WWI. Particular note must be given to the author's extensive use of "background" chapters alternated with the military and political history of the war. These chapters contribute extensively to understanding the progression of events by providing in-depth information on the various individuals, groups, communities and developments that were as much a part of the war as the various battles, tactics and movements that characterized the war itself. The book is a great 'jumping-off' point for WWI aficionados, and should be read in conjunction with "1919", "The Proud Tower", and "Dreadnought", among others. As many other reviewers have said, however, if you are only going to read one book on WWI, this is definitely it.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in WWI. The "background" sections take a step back from the chronological narrative and give more detail about certain aspects of the war. This is a very good way of writing military history and I hope it becomes more common.

After reading this book I'm going to read The Tudors by the same author.

This book is the best single volume tale of WWI I have ever read. You will get a great run down on the war told in a very interesting way. The author puts texture to the tale. He makes the characters come alive through his descriptions. He does an excellent job of working in the mind blowing statistical numbers with the tales of events that gives you a perspective few other books will offer.

Now this book has a special implication to the news today. The maps drawn up at the end of the war is the maps you see on TV news every day. The conflict today over borders all started back in WWI.

I found this book to be well-written and thorough considering the vast subject at hand. The reader will come away with a good understanding of the causes and issues at stake along with a sprinkling of sidelights and personal accounts from the period. More photos and maps would have improved the book but over-all a good starting point for any reader.

This was the first WWI book I ever read. I've read many others since then, all of them focusing on one specific theater, country, or time period of the war. A World Undone is the one book to read if you just want to get an idea of what WWI was all about. Doing a single-volume history of such a complex event forces Meyer to give only brief attention to some very important parts of the war, but there's almost nothing he can be accused of leaving out. I recommend this book to anyone. It'll give you a much more well-rounded perspective on the twentieth century.

A great and easy flowing book, from someone knowing very little about the Great War and even less about what caused or happened during the it. Meyer did a great job in allowing even a novice to easily follow the history the Great War, with background chapters on people and events to help get a better understanding. It also provided great insight into the what the commanders and politicians of the time were thinking and how they performed.

The major battles were also described brilliantly, giving the reader information on how they were prepared, how they were won and the loses from both sides. Meyer also explains some of the major blunders made during the war, leaving you with the question of 'what if?'.

At times I was forgetting/confusing who some people were, or what position/country they were from. But for such a large subject this was a very minor problem.

It was a very enjoyable read and left me wanting to discover more about this time in history. I would recommend it to anyone with even a slight interest in the subject and as a great starting point.

This book provided an excellent and relatively comprehensive history of WWI. Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of the Great War was limited to a few lessons dedicated to the conflict in a college military history course. As can be expected, my understanding of the war was by no means detailed. However, that has now changed. This excellent book offers a great explanation of the causes behind the war; thorough coverage of most major and 'minor' battles; and detailed discussion of the trends/developments that affected the future of the Continent as well as modern warfare. I truly enjoyed this book.

Only one minor complaint, the author should have included a few more maps throughout the body of the book. I continually had to refer to the maps in the front so I could keep all of the events straight. This was particularly true for the Eastern Front. However, this was a minor inconvenience that should not deter anyone from enjoying the book.

I have been a student of the first world war now for the last three years and have since read many volumes on the subject. They of course focus on all the same details of the fighting and even sometimes reveal something new (Hew Strachan's last book revealed that there are color photos from the first world war). This book has a level of detail that I've rarely come across in any of the other books that I have read, the book does not simply assume the commanders were all a bunch of idiots, it shows that they did have some small triumphs in the face of their constant defeats, the book even goes into detail in the planning of many of the great battles of the war. I knew of the Schlieffen plan obviously, but I was unaware that the plan that was actually implimented was as much the work of Helmuth von Moltke as well as Schlieffen.

I currently am still reading this book (MS reader e-book)and am as of this writing reading about the Gallipoli campaign. The books author wrote that he was unsatisfied by not being able to find a one volume book on the war that covered if not everything, then certain aspects of the war that he felt could or should have been covered and that was part of the reason he started on this book. My hats off to you Mr. Meyer,not only have you accomplished what you set out to do, but I think you have written one of the best books of the first world war ever.

One of the best organized books on the enormous subject of WWI I've read. Meyer gives good background details on each empire as they tragically stumble their way to war and illustrates his points with some truly horrific and tragic antidotes. A World Undone goes a long way to humanize a sadly forgotten war.

This is a good introduction to folks with out much background on the war. It is written by an American and seems to be pointed at that audience. The author makes a great effort to provide comprehensive backgrounds about many aspects of the war, it's participants, and European history in general that most American's would not otherwise know.

The book is not particularly scholarly though. There are realitvy few annotations. The author often presents an individual General's thoughts, motivation and philosophy without much supporting information. It would be nice if the author referenced letters, quotes or other documentation that support his suppositions. Otherwise, I don't know if this is conjecture or established fact. I knock a start off for this reason.

I picked up this book to learn more about World War I and was a little surprised to find myself taken with Meyer's prose. Painstakingly researched, tightly written and at times snarky and funny, the book read faster than I expected and was never boring. The highlight mini-chapters at the end of chapter that delve into the war's influential personalities and groups are a special treat, like a cookie with a glass of milk. Pick it up. You won't regret it.

I read the other reviews and thought of getting it from the library or buying a used one (cheap) but once I looked at it in the bookstore I was totally sold. It really is a fabulous collection of info with an irresistable story line leading through it. Tough to put down.

Go into the "Look Inside" feature if you can, to see the first page opening quote of Arch Duke Ferdinand. That's what sold me.

This is one of the most informative and best written military history books I have read. This is a great one volume history, addressing both the politics and war-fighting of the period. It provides complete coverage of the Great War, but only at the level of detail necessary to understand the importance of the event or development being described. Furthermore, everything is concisely placed in context and perspective.

One of the best one volumes histories of any war that I have read. Humanizes an intensely human tragedy that, because of its scale and complexity, can become de-humanized. Recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about this world-shaping event. No prior knowledge required to enjoy the author's prose that simply draw you and in and walk you through this story.

Meyer's approach to the First World War makes for some incredibly absorbing reading. While large and intricately detailed, its even pace never bogs down in pages of minutiae like so many other war tomes can. His handling of the major players of the era, while subjective and sometimes judgmental, seems evenly applied and is fascinating fare. All told, I couldn't put this book down. I'll definitely be watching for more from this author.

I got this book not knowing much about the First World War but wanting to learn more. This book does a great job explaining the background behind key people and events leading up to the war. As well as more in depth sections about the main battles and events of each year. I thought it was very well written and organized and I would definately recommend it. My only minor complaint is the lack of maps. There are a few scattered thoughout but I would have found the battles and troop movements easier to follow with more maps.

Perhaps the most enjoyable book on WWI, or any war for that matter, that I've come across. Well written, and enough detail to be informative without getting too deep into the weeds.

The only mild criticisms I have are - I agree with the earlier review that a few more maps would have been useful. Also I was surprised at the lack of attention paid to the introduction of air warfare, clearly a major story in WWI that got almost no mention in this book. That said, it's tough to be critical of anything about this very enjoyable and eminently readable book.

Looking forward to more from this author.

I have looked for a good and intriguing and accurate portrayal of World War One to read and everything I have come across is dry. This is not dry and is very easy to read and is very thought provoking. I really like it; it makes you really question the ideas you have about World War One, and the best part about it - its fun and interesting to read!

The author is to be commended for a book that manages to cover the entire war on all fronts without letting the story or his writing flag. It's well written and artfully paced, with short "sidebar" chapters on specific people, events and issues that break up what might easily have become a monolith.

Americans are under-educated about WWI since our role was perfunctory. As a result, we do not appreciate that war's impact on the 20th and 21st centuries. This book is a great remedial reader for anyone wanting to bridge that gap.

WWI began as the result of stupidity, unintended consequences, chaos and pride. It concluded on only slight better terms. The specifics make for amazing reading and tell why in 2006 we are still undoing some of the mistakes.

A World Undone also sheds light on Woodrow Wilson's actions. If you thought he was a protective guardian or a hero you will think differently after reading this book.

One reviewer notes the value of the sidebar background articles. Yes, these are very useful. The backwardness of Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman empire speak volumes about what followed, and haunts us today.

Recently visited the WWI museum in Kansas City (awesome), and wanted to know more about WWI. This was the first book I have read on the subject, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I had read other reviews on this book, and this one seemed to have made a very good impression with most readers. I would recommend this book (and the museum!) to anyone wanting to know more.

I have 42 books on WW1 in my library, including most of the well known historian's books. This is absolutely the best, clearest, most lucid and comprehensive one I have read. If you are looking for one book to learn about WW1, this is the one.

In less than 700 pages Mr. Meyer summarized this catrostrophic event by incorporating critical background ambitions and blunders which enables the reader to have a satisfactory overview of the entire event. Great job.

The reviews of this book are rather misleading and I was very disappointed by this book. Obviously, the author conducted extensive research and has impressive knowledge of the Great War, however, the book is tedious and spends critical pages on information that could have easily been cut. Surprisingly, in contrast, the author concludes the book very quickly, leaving little discussion to the significant implications the war had both then and in the future.

Marvelous book in its original format, brilliantly written, but the pricey Kindle version excludes the endpaper maps from the print version, which were complete maps of the Western and Eastern fronts. Without these maps, the reader will need an atlas and great patience to figure out what is happening. Moreover, other maps in the Kindle version are ugly low-res versions that wash out quickly when zoomed, meaning most place names are unintelligible, as they are too small at max res and lose resolution when zoomed.

the store sometimes shows a marked indifference to the needs of Kindle history fans by offering old editions from new edition product links (see Middlekauf's "Glorious Cause") or as in this case by stiffing us on maps. If the Kindle version was $5, this might be a good trade off, but for 13 clams, I expect more.

Also, if the store absolutely must offer downgraded digital content, the product page should be CLEARLY labeled, so the buyer can make an informed choice. Getting a Kindle refund is difficult and convoluted, and it would be better not to have to go through the process in the first place because of a misleading product description.

Not as good as previous book. Found first half a little trite and not well written. The relationships were not that interesting. I would recommend this sequel only because the pace and writing really picked up in the second half when WW2 started.

The ending was a big letdown. I feel like the author goes out of her way to set things up for a sequel and this detracts from what is otherwise a great story. I mean, the great powers of Europe are locked in a death struggle for almost the entire story, and just when you think one country has the upper hand things change in ways no sane person could predict. Seriously, the plot twists are amazing. Then the reader is introduced to side plots around the globe in places like the Arabian desert, Gallipoli, submarines in the Atlantic, the Russian revolution and more. Every reader will have a favorite side and characters, there are dozens to choose from. It is storytelling on par with Ice and Fire and Lord of the Rings.

But, in the end, absolutely nothing gets resolved, America just shows up in the last 5 minutes and the Germans are steamrolled into an unconditional surrender. I feel like Its so obvious that the author caved to the publisher's (or who ever bought movie rights) desire to squeeze a trilogy or at least a sequel out of this thing. Mark my words, Germany is going to make a comeback Just like Gandalf and Megatron did.

And one more thing, I bet that whole thing in the Middle East is going to get spun off into it's own series.

While this is a good history of the First World War, the manufacture of is the worst possible. It literally fell apart as I was reading it. I had to read most of the book out of sections that fell out of the binding. The only sections still in the book were ones I glued in myself after they fell out. It is currently in nine parts. I considered sending it back, but that was way too much hassle. It is much easier for me to hold hard feelings than go through the trouble of sending it back, explaining when I bought it, trying to find proof of purchase, etc. If you really want the history buy the book, but don't expect it to be an easy read because you will have to fight the book falling apart while trying to read it.

Sloppy history. I'm still early in this book and find it very readable. HOWEVER, chapter 4 page 67 of the paperback edition confuses the rule of Peter the Great's widow Catherine (ruled 2 years) with that of his daughter, Empress Elizabeth who ruled 20 years. Empress Elizabeth isn't even mentioned. It is noted he quotes Robert Massie as a source for this section. Massie did not make this error, so somebody didn't pay attention and no editor bothered to make sure this was accurate. When a non-fiction work makes an error on something so basic that makes me question the scholarship and credibility of the work. I've read all of Massie's books on the Romanov's so I have some knowledge on this part of history. I'm not as well read on the other ruling families in the book, but I've got to wonder if the information on them in this book is any more reliable

My husband began reading this book immediately when it arrived. He got a lot of enjoyment from it and from his reaction, I would give it 4 stars. However, halfway through the book, the entire second half came unglued from the spine from normal reading and not from abuse. Now, the pages are falling out. Product review: no stars.

I enjoyed Meyer's presentation and the organization of the subject matter. He drove me to distraction with his syntax and proclivity for interjecting thoughts into the middle of long sentences. I found myself rereading many passages trying to understand his message. I was surprised his editor allowed this.

The facts are there. The details are there. The battles are there. The political convolutions are there. The criminally-stupid diplomatic and strategic
errors are there. Unfortunately, I found the book unrelentingly dull, pedantic, and unengaging, even as a reference book. After slogging through about 100 pages, I gave up.

the store needs another category for reviews. I read the Kindle sample, and liked the book. But when I got ready to buy it, the Kindle version is $1.71 MORE than the paperback! That is beyond absurd! I refuse to reward a publisher who penalizes me for ordering a digital (much cheaper for them to produce and distribute) version of their book. I already have the store Prime so why would I not buy the paperback?

Barbara Tuchman wrote "Guns of August" in the early sixties. No less a light than President John F. Kennedy was so impressed that he recommended that everyone in the State Dept. read it. He also said that military officers should also read it.

Also, there doesn't seem to be any argument about what started the war...the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and entangling alliances.

And, everyone likely to read this book should already know about the decimation of Europe's male youth by the new weapons (modern machine guns and nerve gas), the poorly led troops who were sent on suicide charges into these guns much like the confederates in Picket's charge at Gettysburg.

Also, it's well known that Russia pulled out of the war and the Bolsheviks took over the country. And everyone already knows that the world's leaders botched the peace and set the stage for Hitler and WW II.

Read Tuchman. Her book is a gem.