Norman Stone has taught at universities in Britain and Turkey. He was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 1997 and is currently Professor of History at Bilkent University. He splits his time between Ankara, Istanbul and Oxford. His books include The Eastern Front 1914-1917, which won the Wolfson Prize, and Europe Transformed.
The distinguished Stone (history, Bilken Univ., Ankara, Turkey; The Eastern Front: 1914-1917) has compressed five years of war into admirably terse and effective prose. While full of bons mots, this volume is so compressed that it will probably not be accessible as a primer but could serve as a capstone for advanced study. It should be a part of everyone's World War I collection.-EB Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Stone is as unconventional as he is brilliant, and this provocative interpretation of the Great War combines impressive command of the literature with a telling eye for relevant facts and a sensitive ear for telling epigrams. Stone presents a Europe that in 1914 bestrode the world like the proverbial colossus. Four years later, the continent faced a spectrum of disasters: shattered economies, shattered societies, shattered lives and shattered illusions. Stone demonstrates the contingent nature of the war's outbreak and analyzes the continued failure to achieve decision on the Western Front until 1917. Stone specializes in Great War Russia, does a first-rate job of presenting the consequences of the collapse of four empires: Hapsburg, German, tsarist and Ottoman. He challenges current interpretations of the postwar treaties, presenting them as a list of failures. The attempt to integrate the world economy collapsed. The postwar expansion of colonial empires proved ephemeral. The League of Nations "declined into irrelevance." Stone reserves his harshest criticism for the punitive terms imposed on a Germany convinced neither of its defeat nor the injustice of its cause. That, he asserts convincingly, laid the groundwork for a second, more terrible conflict. Photos, maps. (May) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
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