The War of the World

[Dave Monroe]

Ferguson, Niall.  The War of the World:
   Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of
   the West.  New York: Penguin, 2006.

>From the conflicts that presaged the First World War
to the aftershocks of the cold war, the twentieth
century was by far the bloodiest in all of human
history. How can we explain the astonishing scale and
intensity of its violence when, thanks to the advances
of science and economics, most people were better off
than ever before—eating better, growing taller, and
living longer? Wherever one looked, the world in 1900
offered the happy prospect of ever-greater
interconnection. Why, then, did global progress
descend into internecine war and genocide? Drawing on
a pioneering combination of history, economics, and
evolutionary theory, Niall Ferguson—one of Time
magazine's "100 Most Influential People"—masterfully
examines what he calls the age of hatred and sets out
to explain what went wrong with modernity.

On a quest that takes him from the Siberian steppe to
the plains of Poland, from the streets of Sarajevo to
the beaches of Okinawa, Ferguson reveals an age turned
upside down by economic volatility, multicultural
communities torn apart by the irregularities of boom
and bust, an era poisoned by the idea of
irreconcilable racial differences, and a struggle
between decaying old empires and predatory new states.
Who won the war of the world? We tend to assume it was
the West. Some even talk of the American century. But
for Ferguson, the biggest upshot of twentieth-century
upheaval was the decline of Western dominance over
Asia.

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781594201004,00.html

Ferguson, Niall.  The War of the World:
   History's Age of Hatred.  London: Allen Lane, 2006.

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed
for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively
benign.  Globalizing, booming economies married to
technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better
world for most people.  Instead, the 20th century
proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent,
frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical,
often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies
between the outbreak of the First World War and the
end of the Cold War.  What went wrong?  How did we do
this to ourselves?  The War of the World comes up with
compelling, fascinating answers.  It is Niall
Ferguson's masterpiece. 

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713997088,00.html

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