The War of the World

[rich]

not to be a picky peggy today but I think Ferguson would be better off
writing highschool text books. he has become the Stephen Ambrose of our
time.

his pining for America to wake up to its emperialistic spirit is rather
shrill and not conducive for the health of a privelaged British gentlemen.

rich


On 9/13/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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