Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.
One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about. European history is one of those areas. So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year. This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.
A detailed history book like this is hard to review. I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.) There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.) But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war. It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong. So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.
It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were. Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops. Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started. At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.
