AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
![]() ![]() The terrible 1914-18 conflict fell short of being a world war except to those for whom Europe, the United States, and their empires were all the world that mattered. From the sexual passions of Paris to Woodrow Wilson’s bartering Chinese territory to buy off a Japanese resolution against racism, there is probably more treachery, romance, idealism and betrayal in this book than in all of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre. Paris 1919 reads like a novel, except that no novelist would be allowed so many wild characters or such dense, intertwined and fascinating plots. It displaced at least two books I had pledged to review, distracted me delightfully from a significant conference, comforted me through the delays and frustrations of modern air travel, and held my attention until the not-so-small hours of a weekday morning. ![]() Received on the eve of a busy trip to Washington, the volume took over my life. I am not sure that the ensuing decades have substantially undermined her thesis, but I would cheerfully offer Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 as a conspicuous exception. About half a century ago, the late Hilda Neatby complained, in her contribution to the Massey Report on the State of Arts and Letters in Canada, that Canadian academic historians generally communicated poorly. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |