Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it surprised a European population enjoying the most beautiful summer in memory. For nearly a century since, historians have debated the causes of the war. Some have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; others have concluded it was unavoidable.

In Europe’s Last Summer, David Fromkin provides a different answer: hostilities were commenced deliberately. In a riveting re-creation of the run-up to war, Fromkin shows how German generals, seeing war as inevitable, manipulated events to precipitate a conflict waged on their own terms. Moving deftly between diplomats, generals, and rulers across Europe, he makes the complex diplomatic negotiations accessible and immediate. Examining the actions of individuals amid larger historical forces, this is a gripping historical narrative and a dramatic reassessment of a key moment in the twentieth-century.

• American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam (Modern War Studies)
• A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
• Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
• For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
• The First World War
• The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I
• Armies of the Poor
• The Leopard: A Novel
• The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History