Click on image to enlarge.
|
A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918 [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader]
eBook by G.J. Meyer
| |
Regular |
|
 |
|
Club |
| You Pay: |
$21.00 |
|
|
|
$17.85 |
| Micropay Rebate: |
$9.45 |
|
|
|
$8.03 |
| Cost After Rebate: |
$11.55 |
|
|
|
$9.82 |
| You Save: |
45% |
|
|
|
53.24% |
eBook Category: History
eBook Description:  The First World War is one of history's greatest tragedies. In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe's mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc./Dell Publishing
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2006
11 Reader Ratings:
|
|
|
|
| Great |
Good |
OK |
Poor |
Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT [5.4 MB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [7.5 MB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [4.0 MB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [5.6 MB]
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 9780440335870
Adobe Reader ISBN: 0440335876
Mobipocket Reader ISBN: 9780440335870
eReader ISBN: 9780440335870
GEOGRAPHIC RESTRICTIONS: Available to customers in: US, CA What's this?
 
"A World Undone is an original and very readable account of one of the most significant and often misunderstood events of the last century. With an historians eye for clear headed analysis and a storytellers talent for detail and narrative, G.J Meyer presents a compelling account of the blunders that produced the world's first "great war" and set the stage for many of the tragic events that followed." -- Steve Gillon, Resident Historian, The History Channel
"This is one of those books where you read every page.... Meyer organizes his book chronologically, and accompanies each chapter with a short background essay.... [A World Undone] has the very best qualities for this kind of comprehensive approach: a gift for compression and an eye for the telling detail." -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "A comprehensive history aimed at the general reader....You finish this book feeling you’ve learned everything anyone reasonably needs to know about The Great War." -- Pittsburgh Tribune-Review "Meyer breathes life into the human story within the Great War. He provides in-depth profiles of many of the political and military leaders of that era, and explains why they were so important....This is a literary vision of WWI that few of us have ever encountered. Simply put, this is historical reporting at its best." -- Smoky Mountain Sentinel "Thundering, magnificent...this is a book of true greatness that prompts moments of sheer joy and pleasure. Researched to last possible dot...It will earn generations of admirers." -- Washington Times "Especially suited for the interested American reader…. Meyer's sketches of the British Cabinet, the Russian Empire, the aging Austro-Hungarian Empire, the leaders of Prussia with their newly minted swagger, are lifelike and plausible. His account of the tragic folly of Gallipoli is masterful…. It should go without saying that in 2006 … [A World Undone] has an instructive value that can scarely be measured." -- Los Angeles Times "Accomplished with brio... [Meyer] blends 'foreground, background, and sidelights' to highlight the complex interactions of apparently unconnected events behind the four-year catastrophic war that destroyed a world and defined a century." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
June 28:
The Black Hand Descends
"It's nothing. It's nothing."
--Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Thirty-four long, sweet summer days separated the morning of June 28, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shot to death, from the evening of August 1, when Russia's foreign minister and Germany's ambassador to Russia fell weeping into each other's arms and what is rightly called the Great War began.
On the morning when the drama opened, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was making an official visit to the city of Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, at the southernmost tip of the Austro-Hungarian domains. He was a big, beefy man, a career soldier whose intelligence and strong will usually lay concealed behind blunt, impassive features and eyes that, at least in his photographs, often seemed cold and strangely empty. He was also the eldest nephew of the Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph and therefore--the emperor's only son having committed suicide--heir to the imperial crown. He had come to Bosnia in his capacity as inspector general of the Austro-Hungarian armies, to observe the summer military exercises, and he had brought his wife, Sophie, with him. The two would be observing their fourteenth wedding anniversary later in the week, and Franz Ferdinand was using this visit to put Sophie at the center of things, to give her a little of the recognition she was usually denied.
Back in the Hapsburg capital of Vienna, Sophie was, for the wife of a prospective emperor, improbably close to being a nonperson. At the turn of the century the emperor had forbidden Franz Ferdinand to marry her. She was not of royal lineage, was in fact a mere countess, the daughter of a noble but impoverished Czech family. As a young woman, she had been reduced by financial need to accepting employment as lady-in-waiting to an Austrian archduchess who entertained hopes of marrying her own daughter to Franz Ferdinand. All these things made Sophie, according to the rigid protocols of the Hapsburg court, unworthy to be an emperor's consort or a progenitor of future rulers. The accidental discovery that she and Franz Ferdinand were conducting a secret if chaste romance--that he had been regularly visiting the archduchess's palace not to court her daughter but to see a lowly and thirtyish member of the household staff--sparked outrage, and Sophie had to leave her post. But Franz Ferdinand continued to pursue her. In his youth he had had a long struggle with tuberculosis, and perhaps his survival had left him determined to live his private life on his own terms. Uninterested in any of the young women who possessed the credentials to become his bride, he had remained single into his late thirties. The last two years of his bachelorhood turned into a battle of wills with his uncle the emperor over the subject of Sophie Chotek.
Franz Joseph finally tired of the deadlock and gave his consent. What he consented to, however, was a morganatic marriage, one that would exclude Sophie's descendants from the succession. And so on June 28, 1900, fourteen years to the day before his visit to Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand appeared as ordered in the Hapsburg monarchy's Secret Council Chamber. In the presence of the emperor, the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, the Primate of Hungary, all the government's principal ministers, and all the other Hapsburg archdukes, he solemnly renounced the Austro-Hungarian throne on behalf of any children that he and Sophie might have and...
|
)
