Adam Hochschild

Harvard Book Store is honored to welcome journalist and National Book Award–finalist ADAM HOCHSCHILD as he discusses his new book exploring the legacy of WWI,
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918.

World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. 

Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.”

"WWI effected the rupture of civilization on many levels—the efficacy of war machinery for mass murder, the collapse of colonial empires, the destabilization of the status quo by modern ideas such as socialism, women's suffrage and national self-determination—and the author skillfully harnesses these numerous and often contradictory currents. Hochschild focuses on Britain and many of the significant, prominent or otherwise typical protagonists whose lives and work underscored the cataclysmic changes in this era, from loyal aristocrats to pacifists and conscientious objectors.... The lives of the author's many characters dovetail elegantly in this moving, accessible book." —Kirkus Reviews