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First World War
by: Martin Gilbert

Off The Bookshelf's Price: £14.99

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Used Price: £2.24
Third Party New Price: £7.85

Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 355
EAN: 9780006376668
ISBN: 0006376665
Label: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Number Of Pages: 640
Publication Date: September 11, 1995
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Studio: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Sales Rank: 114666

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- An ambivalent account
While Martin Gilbert is clearly writing from a position of huge erudition and learning, the structure of the book is such, in my humble opinion, that it is unclear what his exact purpose is. On the one hand he is trying to paint the big picture, detailing all the intricacies of the various fronts of the war, even introducing fronts that I didn't know or had forgotten were there, such as those of Salonica or Libya. On the other hand he is trying to leaven it with the personal experiences of soldiers on the ground. And while we do get some sort of cross section of the experiences of combatants from the various participant nations, by far the largest preponderance of these are of the British experience on the Western Front. One is thus left ... Read More:

Rating:

- Brilliant narrative history
This is narrative history at its best. It covers events chronologically, moving from front to front, but without awkward breaks. The coverage is military and political but also the human dimension, with many stories of individual tragedy, horror and heroism. This will stay with me for a long time. The only slight downer is the maps, which are all at the end of the book, unrelated to the narrative and not terribly clear.

Rating:

- small print
i loved martin gilberts world war 2 but this version has been shrunk down the letters are so small makes hard reading .AVOID or get a bigger copy

Rating:

- A masterpiece of history

This is a great history boook, one of the definitive histories of the great war. Very detailed and very accessible.

I msut have read a different book to the some of the critics on here, GIlbert has gone to great lenghths to write about other fronts and areas where the war was fought and what was going on. For example I remember a paragraph about a British Pacific island being visited by a German warship early in the war. The people on the island were so isolated and remote they werent aware of the war and had helped the warship with supplies, unthinkable in our world of instant varied communication. They are loads of stories like this from the Russian Front, the Italinan front, the war in China, Africa, the Pacific, the USA ... Read More:

Rating:

- A FIRST-CLASS HISTORY
This is certainly one of the finest single-volume histories of the First World War that I have read: concise, clear and comprehensive. I recommend it most highly both for content and readability. It covers land sea and air, the home fronts, all the fighting forces, the high commands, and the fighting men. A paricularly welcome feature of this excellent book are the stories of individuals. It is indeed a true masterpiece of the historian's craft.

Books : First World War