Certainly good overview, but lacks synthesis. In addition, unequal attention to political and diplomatic background (the peace overtures), very military-oriented. Rating 2.5 stars

For war strategists and battle buffs, this would be a great book. For me, while I did learn much, it was a difficult read and rather clinical in its approach. For me, it didn't really tell the story of the human experience - although it didn't ignore it all together.

However, I suspect if I were to read other books on WW1, this book will have left me with a broad context that will enhance other WW1 perspectives.

I read this book to fill a gap in my history reading. Basically, what I knew about WWI was that it was a stupid war, somehow connected with the assassination of the crown prince of Austria-Hungary by Serbian nationalists, that killed vast numbers of people and planted the roots of WWII.

After reading this book, I now know that’s all true. WWI should have been a regional action between Austria-Hungary and Serbia (if even that), but alliances and military strategies played out like bad automated trading with no closing of markets to break the cycle. Everyone knew that victory had to be quick, so strategies were all offensive. Troop transportation was the same as the mid-1800s: trains, horses and boots (admittedly bicycles and taxis were sometimes used), army strategies were the same too (massed charges over open ground against dug in enemy positions), but the weapons were much more devastating. When the war reached effective stalemate after about 6 months (or 180 pages into a 430-page book), cooler heads should have negotiated peace. Instead they fought another 4 years, killing millions.

It must be difficult to write a history of a multinational war. There are so many armies, so many unfamiliar names and places (Przemysl, anyone?), not to mention that the French right is the German left, the first British commander’s name is French, and Roman numerals require a pause to translate. None of that is the writer’s fault. Neither is the fact that this book should have four times more maps. But it should have four times more maps. The book is thorough and and well written, but perhaps unavoidably a fairly tedious read. Don’t ask me for the details. I’ll have to read it again.

A well researched, exhaustively detailed, but ultimately a very tedious read for most of its 400+ pages. There were way too many of the below type paragraphs:

‘Its war plan allotted only one of its eight armies to the Eastern Front, the Eighth Army, …consisting of the I, XVII, and XX corps, the I reserve Corps, and the 1st Cavalry Division. All were Prussian based, the I and I Reserve at Konigsberg, seat of the Teutonic Knights, The XVII at Danzig, the XX at Allenstein, the 1st Cavalry Division at Konigsberg, Insterburg and Deutsche-Eylau. To the 8th army was added on mobilisation a collection of reserve, Ersatz and Landwehr formations….’

And so on. If the historian could have only included more about the men, more about the normal interactions of the armies, and a little less about groups like ‘the Vladimir, Suzdal, Uglich, and Kazan Regiments of the 16th Infantry, the Lithuanian, Volhuynian and Grenadier Regiments, the Hussars and Cossacks of the Black sea…’, it would have been slightly less of a slog.

At times, he did tone down this tendency to overwhelm the reader. There were sections in the book when I thought it would settle into a more accessible style - like Ambrose, or Manchester - but they were far and few in between.

Other things I noticed was that the American role was very shortchanged. They don’t show up until the final 50 pages, and even at that they share those 50 pages with a handful of other events occurring towards the end of the war. Fair enough I suppose, since America really didn’t show up until the final 16 months of the 4 year war, but I think the writer minimized their efforts a bit.

However, in any book like this, you learn a lot. Who knew that Romania battled Bulgaria, and that Austrians and Italians hated each other so much? And don’t even get started on the Finnish civil war that occurred around this time too, which the author also covers. But the American involvement merited the small amount of print that it did? Guess so…

"Generals were like men without eyes, without ears, unable to watch the operations they set in progress, unable to hear the reports of their development and unable to speak to those whom they had originally given orders once action was joined. The war had become bigger than those who fought it." This along with many other notable quotes show why Keegan deserves the praise he gets for this work. All major campaigns and operations are covered, the implications the war (and the conflicts it birthed) had on the world at its end are all covered in good order. The absurd leadup and attempts at avoidance are covered well, which also showed a Europe of the early 20th century as one that was united in many ways with the educated masses across the continent studying much of the same authors, languages, and classics (Hegel, Nietzsche, Homer, Livy, Dante, Balzac, Dickens, Goethe, and other old-world fools). They also were happy to all work together to bring the hammer down on rebellious Chinese people in the Boxer Rebellion, but of course was done only to protect the ruling parties' interests. Capitalist nation-state and bourgeois competition gave way to four years of HELL for all parties and ushered in the true era of industrial barbarism as Eric Hobsbawm noted and preached. Keegan of course leaves out a materialist analysis as he is a military historian with a rather clear bias that shines through even in a work of mostly military history. But by God if you want the exact positions of every French army unit at Verdun, Russian/German divisional movements at Tannenberg and every other Goddamn battle then this book should be GREAT for you.

As a big-picture history, it's mostly fine, but Keegan's obvious boosterism (and incessant focus) on the British participation in the war, while understandable given his time teaching at Sandhurst, really detracts from the book and leads to occasional cringe-inducing moments. For example, he acknowledges criticisms of Haig and Joffre as valid, then goes to bat for them. Later, he argues that the war was a senseless, futile waste, but almost cheers on British units for valiantly being gunned down.

What's more, for a writer who gave us the Face of War, an absolutely astounding book, this history of the war is an incredibly Allied-centric (and Tommy centric) telling of the war. There's relatively little from the perspective of the Central Powers, let alone the Russians or the non-Commonwealth troops who fought. To be sure, such troops are often denigrated outright in the book as "second-rate" or "third-rate" with little explanation given. Given the circumstances of the battlefield in many cases (at least on the Western Front), it's difficult to see why a "Pals" battallion with next to no training would be inherently better than colonial troops from India.

With all those reservations (and more), it's still a worthwhile read to get your bearings on WW I.

Overt in scholarship, meticulous, mind-numbing, dizzying in detail, and haze inducing. I love history and was looking for a readable account of WWI. I have a marathon mentality and a fairly long leash for tough reads... this one had me pleading No Mas ala Roberto Duran vs. Sugar Ray Leonard about 40% of the way into the text..this book totally lacked any humantity at all. The prose was antiseptic. Filled with an obsessive maze of names, directions, tributaries, rivers, the movement and splitting or joining of Divisions, and brief asides and tangents with no relation at all to the war or story. No one may know more about this war than Keegan, but he fails badly in conveying it clearly and effectively.

If I had to rate this book on content alone I would give it 5 stars. The thorough research put into this book is impressive. Dates, locations, regiment, and battle information, it’s all here. I appreciate the level of detail, but I found it difficult to keep engaged because at times a lot of names and dates were being rattled off in quick succession. And it’s for that reason I gave this book a 3-star rating.

I loved the maps, I learned a lot, and I look forward to learning more about WWI. If you enjoy reading about military tactics, you’ll enjoy this book.

I desperately hoped this would be a definitive, engrossing account of the war, incorporating the words and actions of generals and front line soldiers. It manages to make one of the most heartbreaking, significant events of the 20th century into a dusty roll call of which brigades, which divisions began the assault or retreated, the dispositions of their forces, their available munitions... If you're really into model soldiers you might find this delightful, but I expect more from a historian.

Even the vignettes intended to humanize the events of the war feel slapdash or hackneyed, presented as a sop to an overly sentimental lay readership. He has a terrible propensity to name-drop whenever possible, regardless of its relevance to the matter at hand. Did you know Hitler served in the Kaiser's army?! Who could have known Rommel was a WWI veteran? And hush my mouth if the guy John Buchan based his famous protagonist on wasn't in the British army!

But worst of all, Keegan's prose is as tortuous, labyrinthine and muddy as any trench on the western front. I present these examples, egregious but in no way singular:

"The unmarked graveyard of his squadrons inside the remotest islands of the British Archipelago, guarding the exit from the narrow seas his fleet would have had to penetrate to achieve true oceanic status, remains as a memorial to selfish and ultimately pointless military ambition."

"In the event, his Ottoman liaison officer, Jaafar Pasha, after being wounded and captured by South African troops at Aqqaqia on 26 February 1916, defected to the Allies and became commander of Hussein's northern army in the later stages of the successful Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916-18."

The book does shed light on fronts I never knew existed, from guerrilla warfare in east Africa to pitched naval battles off the coast of South America. And no-one will argue it isn't thoroughly researched (or in the absence of checking his sources, at least thoroughly foot-noted). But its greatest contribution is to redouble my resolve to read Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," a historian who can both research and write.

Only a historian as talented as Keegan could tell the whole story of WWI in 400+ pages....an amazing feat. But he does it with style and readability, even though the first several chapters are dry as dust! He hits his stride with the latter part of 1915 and holds the reader's interest from that point forward.

Anyone who reads the history of the Great War is horrified by the unbelievable and unnecessary slaughter of a generation of British, French, and German young men who marched upright into a barrage of machine gun fire time and time again.....and all for a few yards of ground that would be lost the next day. For what?.....that is the question that haunts the reader throughout the book and has puzzled historians for decades. The author attempts to solve that puzzle but even he admits that there is no "correct' answer. He agrees that WWII was just an extension of the Great War due to the fact that Germany felt that their military was never beaten and that they were sold out by the politicians. This is a must read for the WWI buff and highly recommended.

A solid overview of the First World War, however, I will keep looking for a more complete history. This volume will appeal to military enthusiasts, as it focuses on battles, tactics and weapons, rather than the politics, and the wider impacts of the war on society.

The Somme? Verdun? Flanders? I realized I had very little knowledge of the first terrible war that shaped the 20th century. Last year I read Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August." I loved it but since it only concentrated on the summer of 1914, it made me yearn for a more comprehensive history of the Great War. "The First World War" by John Keegan is exactly what I wanted.

Keegan certainly assumes the reader has some sort of background and knowledge of the First World War, but I don't think it's necessary to have extensive knowledge before picking it up. While he doesn't go into as much detail as Tuchman (or else the book would be 2000+ pages!), he tells the story and battles of WWI in a very matter of fact manner but in a way that's interesting and not dry and boring like a lot of history novels. Keegan, despite being an Englishman, tells history in a non-biased manner. However, there's also a lot of trauma and sorrow surrounding the war (and rightly so) and he does his crown and country justice through beautiful prose of the more unfortunate and terrible battles of the empire, like Gallipoli and the Somme.

One part was hard to get through for me and it dealt with the Russian Revolution and counter-revolution and Germany's involvement after Russia pulled out of the war in 1918. I didn't get how it fit into the novel's relevance. Perhaps the biggest genius of John Keegan is this novel isn't a stand alone novel, he does a great job at tying it into greater European and international politics and economics. An argument I had never heard and that took Keegan a novel to complete, was that Bolshevik victory in Russia was because of Germany's support for it after the peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk, which charted the course for the rest of the events in the 20th century.

Great book, well written. Will definitely check out his novel on WWII and this will not be the last time I pick up this novel to read.