Thought-provoking, and often mordantly ironic.” The New Yorker
“Beatty's achievement isn't so much in discovering new material about World War I as it is in taking apart what is known about 1914 and assembling it in a different form. We see, of course, what might have beenbut more important, we see, in a different light, what was. It was a calamity.” David Shribman, The Boston Globe
“Beatty seeks to navigate the historiography of the first great conflict of the twentieth century away from the 'metaphysical no-man's land of historical inevitability' and back into the 'trenches of empiricism.'” The New Statesman
“Beatty... captures the sweep of the events that gripped the world and illuminates the epic arrogance, the paranoia, the pettiness and the myopic self-serving views of the European heads of state who had laid the cornerstone of a conflict that would lead to the deaths of millions from Moscow to Maine.” Paul Collins, Nashua Telegraph
“Beatty has a great eye for the vivid details that reveal character...'Downton Abbey' notwithstanding, the prewar era really does seem like a lost time. Beatty manages to shed some light on that receding era.” Michael Hill, The Associated Press
“THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914 brings alive much of the official world of a century ago.” Bruce Ramsey, Seattle Times
“Bold stuff...[An] exuberant and bulging rag-bag of counter-factual history that challenges the 'cult of inevitability' that Europe's war-leaders were retrospectively so eager to embrace.” David Crane, The Spectator
“[A] startling study of what Woodrow Wilson called 'an injury to civilization.'” Eve Ottenberg, In These Times
“Spritely, captivating…[Beatty's book] delivers his signature storyteller's insights. Hardly any writer working today can amass such an enormous array of information and shape it all so effortlessly into paragraph after compelling paragraph. The centennial of World War I is bound to produce a tsunami of verbiage – and, if we're lucky, some genuinely first-rate stuff. THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914…steals a march on all of them. Highly recommended.” Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
“THE LOST HISTORY OF 1914 will leave its mark on how we think about World War I and perhaps, beyond that, on how we think about history and history in the making.” Harvey Blume, The Arts Fuse
Was World War I an inevitable disaster looking for a catalyst? Not so, writes On Point news analyst Beatty (Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, 2007, etc.) in this intermittently illuminating but deeply frustrating new history. What happened is well known. After Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, pieces locked in place that engaged the major powers in a catastrophic war. Austria, backed by Germany, declared war on Serbia, which was backed by Russia; soon, Russia's ally France entered the fray, as did Britain. After years of trying to stay out of it, the United States was pulled in when it looked as if Mexico was going to try to reclaim parts of Texas. Things could have easily been different, writes Beatty, as the countries involved were all locked in internal struggles that could have taken different outcomes, and Princip's bullet could have easily missed and struck another target--if it had, the living Ferdinand would not have argued for war. Not only that, but he would have acceded to the throne following Austria-Hungary's Emperor Franz Joseph's death in 1916, and would likely have been too embroiled in civil strife to deal with a war with Serbia. Once war was engaged, it was kept alive by press censorship in the countries involved. The French, English and Germans did not know the scale of suffering endured by their soldiers, and may not have wanted to. By the time the U.S. joined in 1917, it only prolonged the struggle. A post-Armistice food blockade starved Germany, and the children of that war would unite under the father figure of Adolf Hitler. The author provides a well-researched, compelling thesis, but the narrative lacks strong portraiture, the motivations aren't always made clear and the drama, except in rare instances, remains on a simmer. This may prove to be an important book for students of "counterfactual" history, but only occasionally does this story about a world going up in flames ever ignite.