The Last Magnificent War: Rare Journalistic and Eyewitness Accounts of World War I - Hardcover

The editor of The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Eyewitness Reports has undertaken a comparable survey of World War I and the result is comprehensive and informative. There are contributions by Albert Beveridge, Oswald Garrison Villard, Eddie Rickenbacker, T. E. Lawrence and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among others. The topics range from a disquisition by a German general on the right to make war, through the invention of atrocity stories by the press and the training of black troops, to the Russian revolution and the massacre of Armenians by the Turks. Some of the writing will strike contemporary readers as naive or condescending, but the collection's most enduring impression is that journalistic writing 75 years ago was more ponderous than today's.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is a straightforward collection of odds and ends of World War I writings, all contemporary and most by eyewitnesses or participants. Only a few of the names will be familiarT. E. Lawrence, Edward Rickenbacker, Mary Roberts Rinehart. Most of these very short pieces are forgotten fragments of passion and analysis that now seem curiously remote and, sometimes, barely comprehensible in the immediacy of their emotions and the shortness of their vision. There is no documentary material. Primarily interesting and useful for students, historians, and specialists. Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army TRALINET Ctr . , Ft . Monroe, Va.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.