
Catastrophe 1914
Europe Goes to War
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Max Hastings
About this listen
From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles - the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg - that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches.
In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud, and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also recreates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia, and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians, and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas.
As he has done in his celebrated, award-winning works on World War II, Hastings gives us frank assessments of generals and political leaders and masterly analyses of the political currents that led the continent to war. He argues passionately against the contention that the war was not worth the cost, maintaining that Germany’s defeat was vital to the freedom of Europe. Throughout we encounter statesmen, generals, peasants, housewives, and private soldiers of seven nations in Hastings’ accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts: generals dismounting to lead troops in bayonet charges over 1,500 feet of open ground; farmers who at first decried the requisition of their horses; infantry men engaged in a haggard retreat, sleeping four hours a night in their haste. This is a vivid new portrait of how a continent became embroiled in war and what befell millions of men and women in a conflict that would change everything.
©2013 Max Hastings (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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-
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-
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-
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-
-
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By: G. J. Meyer
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- Length: 24 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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-
-
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-
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Overall
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-
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War is hell get over it
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Overall
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Performance
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Overall
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Performance
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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 20th 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 psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society - and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and the single-minded Communist dictatorship under Lenin.
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Not Enough Context
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Critic reviews
“The political and chattering classes are right to be worried: if any region today could cause a crisis comparable to that of 1914, it is the Middle East. They need a new book on the outbreak of World War I, and now they have it in Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. [Hastings is] an outstanding historian...a victorious foray.... Tuchman has been supplanted.” (Hew Strachan, The New York Times)
“[World War I’s] centennial is almost upon us. Among the resulting flood of books, it’ll be hard to find one better than this early entry...absorbing and compulsively readable.... Like an eagle soaring over this vast terrain, Hastings swoops in and out, spying broad features and telling details alike...superb.” (Alan Cate, The Cleveland Plain Dealer)
“Hastings over the past two decades has become the contemporary premier historian of 20th-century war.... The real strength of this story is how Mr. Hastings portrays the principal characters, not as stereotyped tyrants, greedy empire builders or mindless militarists, but rather as very real human beings with as many flaws as virtues.... Will the past be prologue? Get this book.” (James Srodes, Washington Times)
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Best book about Covid-19 I’ve read so far
- By KarenT on 06-11-21
By: Lawrence Wright
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World War Two
- A Graphic Account of the Greatest and Most Terrible Event in Human History (All You Need to Know)
- By: Sir Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Jon Connell
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Within Western culture, World War Two continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that it was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity.
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Takeaways from our most eloquent living historian
- By Ted on 10-16-22
By: Sir Max Hastings
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Abe
- Abraham Lincoln in His Times
- By: David S. Reynolds
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 33 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.
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A Cultural History is not a biography
- By Marc M. Sager on 11-09-20
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
- Native America from 1890 to the Present
- By: David Treuer
- Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau
- Length: 17 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The received idea of Native American history - as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did 150 Sioux die at the hands of the US Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative.
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excellent text, awful narrator
- By D. Rubinstein on 12-01-19
By: David Treuer
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Spearhead
- An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II
- By: Adam Makos
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the international best seller A Higher Call comes the riveting World War II story of an American tank gunner’s journey into the heart of the Third Reich, where he will meet destiny in an iconic armor duel - and forge an enduring bond with his enemy.
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Excellent
- By Msgr. John R. McGrath on 03-11-19
By: Adam Makos
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The Origins of the Modern World
- A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century, 2nd Edition (World Social Change)
- By: Robert B. Marks
- Narrated by: Michael Sears
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the "rise of the West" is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles.
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Hard to listen to
- By adam bardaro on 02-26-20
By: Robert B. Marks
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Soldiers
- Great Stories of War and Peace
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Max Hastings, Ric Jerrom
- Length: 24 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales by many writers, about men and women who have borne arms, reflecting best-selling historian Max Hastings’ lifetime of studying war. It rings the changes through the centuries, between the heroic, tragic and comic; the famous and the humble. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Worth the Read
- By David A on 10-31-21
By: Max Hastings
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Powers and Thrones
- A New History of the Middle Ages
- By: Dan Jones
- Narrated by: Dan Jones
- Length: 24 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era—and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation. In a gripping narrative bursting with big names—from St Augustine and Attila the Hun to the Prophet Muhammad and Eleanor of Aquitaine—Dan Jones charges through the history of the Middle Ages. Powers and Thrones takes listeners on a journey through an emerging Europe, the great capitals of late Antiquity, as well as the influential cities of the Islamic West.
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Hard to take a break from it!
- By Mariano's Music on 12-09-21
By: Dan Jones
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The Secret War
- Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 30 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Spies, codes, and guerrillas played unprecedentedly critical roles in the Second World War, exploited by every nation in the struggle to gain secret knowledge of its foes, and to sow havoc behind the fronts. In The Secret War, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance, to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history.
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Better read than listened to
- By B. In -t Veld on 03-25-17
By: Max Hastings
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Collapse
- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Christopher Murney
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Abridged
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In his million-copy best seller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?
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an fascinating book, but better on paper
- By Rebecca on 04-11-05
By: Jared Diamond
Amazing author, excellent voice actor
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The breadth and comprehensiveness of the research.
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My only complaint is that Hastings' frequently uses quotes in languages other than English, most often in French, and they are rarely translated. I realize that it is a failing on my part to be largely ignorant of languages other than my native tongue, but I feel I missed out on some of the important insights Hastings felt needed to be added to the narrative. It should have been relatively easy for Mr. Vance to provide a quick translation.
In summary, it is a long book, but well worth the time. Just be prepared for an overwhelming sadness because of Man's inhumanity.
Sobering
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Many individual stories
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Knowing Something More
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Excellent Treatment of the Causes of WWI
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Phenominal
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I thought I knew the battle of the frontiers
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Humanity in brutality
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At least!
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