A few weeks ago, I was stuck in the airport, my flight delayed by five hours. While I tend not to read many ebooks myself, on that Friday, however, I was very glad to have remote access to my library's online collection to ease the boredom of the wait and the subsequent flight. Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars was a book that I had meant to read a while ago but never gotten around to, and it proved an engrossing read. Just over a century ago when the nations of Europe declared war on one another, much of the populace broke out into spontaneous celebration. Cheering crowds gathered before the royal palaces in Germany, Russia, and Britain. It was a war that many in Europe had expected for years, war's outbreak an event that had been both feared and longed for. But not everyone was cheering, and it is the dissenters to the war that Hochschild focuses much of his attention on. While men like Rudyard Kipling celebrated the war as heroic, others like Bertrand Russell sp...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.