Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War

Pandora's Box by Jorn Leonhard

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R352OWG2HIOA4Y?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Peter Jackson's “They Shall Not Grow Old” sparked a belated interest in World War I. I say belated because I saw the movie and read this book in 2019, not during the centennial of World War I, which was strangely muted.

This book covers World War I from soup to nuts. It starts off with history leading up to World War 1 and then moves into the war on a year by year, country by country, battlefield and home front basis. This provides the reader with an immersion in the experience of the war and provides a greater appreciation for what the people living through it went through as they realized that the romantic ideas of the war that they had at the beginning turned into a horrifying reality.

There are a lot of details in this book that explains how Word War 1 evolved. One of the details that surprised me was that according to the author there was not a great outpouring of enthusiasm for the war by the majority of Europeans. Whatever war enthusiasm there was remained mostly in the large cities. In the countryside, the war was looked at with trepidation.

I listened to this as an audible book I did not have any problems with comprehension. The text remained captivating and informative at all times.