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

Rating:
Summary: Naming names.
Review: This is as lucid an explanation of the tangled web European diplomats and military men weaved during the seminal summer of 1914. Fromkin does a fine job of disentangling it all and assigning motivations to the key players. It was, as he explains, pure balance of power politics, either an effort to maintain supremacy if you had it, or achieve it if you didn't. He lays the confusion as to the "causes" of WWI that have been so furiously debated for so long to what he maintains were two wars rather than one. What started as an Austria-Hungary vs Serbia war was co-opted by Germany to launch its preferred war against Russia and France.
Fromkin paints a less damning potrait of Kaiser Willie than one has become accustomed to, his fault here not infantile militarism, but that he lost control of his subordinates who executed or twisted his orders to serve their own belligerent ends.
Fromkin also argues that the "lessons" of the war that so many of Barbara Tuchman's generation grew up with, that the war started because the policy-makers lost control of events and were instead controlled by them, is false. Fromkin argues convincingly that the war started because the men in control in Austria and Germany wanted it. And he "names names" of those who were most responsible.
He absolves many of those who tried to prevent the oncoming cataclysm from blame, suggesting that it was not their incompetence that led to war but rather an unsettling fact of life: It takes two to make a peace, but only one to start a war.
Agree or not, Fromkin will leave all his readers with much to mull over after concluding this concise and convincing exposition of one of history's most contentious controversies: Who started World War One?

Rating:
Summary: Would have made an excellent article
Review: While not disagreeing with Mr Fromkin's conclusions or questioning his scholarship, there is not enough substance here to warrant a book of this size. The essential meat of his message would have been far more effectively served in a cogent 5,000 word article in Harpers or the New Yorker.
The first part of the book seems essentially a precis of Massie's magisterial Dreadnought with a few extra territorial considerations thrown in. Because it is of such shallow depth, major events such as the basis of Churchill's fear that the British fleet was in danger of a preemptive attack by Germany in 1911 is covered in one 5 line sentence. The second part, because of its Agatha Christie-like structure, is repetitive to the point of boredom: the basis of and delay in Austria's attack on Serbia being explained over and over again. On being told that Italy is a peninsula that stretches from central Europe to the middle of the Mediterranean, one has to wonder what educational level Mr Frommer was attributing to an audience likely to buy a book addressing such a subject.