Best World War 1 Books

One by one the boys begin to fallIn 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the glorious war. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young unknown soldier experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches....

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a lite...

The First World War: To Arms v.1 Features Hew Strachan's monumental account on the First World War. This work combines military and strategic perspectives with those of cultural, diplomatic, economic, and social history and also represents the viewpoints of Germany, England, and France. Full description...

Longer novels from Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo are always a particular treat, and Private Peaceful is no exception. Tragic, surprising and engaging in equal measures, Morpurgo's novel charts both the childhood of young Thomas Peaceful in the early years of the 20th century, and his eventual underage enlistment in the British army to help f...

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain's elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's end sh...

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and how it could have been stopped but wasn'...

Evelyn Waugh's acclaimed World War II trilogy comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. This narrative spanning the war, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head ...

Based on a true account of a football game played between the German and English troops in no-man's land on Christmas Day in 1914 during World War I, this book tells the story of four young men who have recently enlisted and have found that war is not as glamorous as they had once thought. The young men get to realize their dream of playing footbal...

A rare and remarkable cultural history of World War I that unearths the roots of modernism Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I, from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, to the death of Hitler in 1945. Recognizing that The Great War was the psychological tu...

The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to ...