cover image The Last Magnificent War: Rare Journalistic and Eyewitness Accounts of World War I

The Last Magnificent War: Rare Journalistic and Eyewitness Accounts of World War I

. Paragon House Publishers, $24.95 (418pp) ISBN 978-1-55778-030-0

The editor of The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Eyewitness Reports has undertaken a comparable survey of World War I and the result is comprehensive and informative. There are contributions by Albert Beveridge, Oswald Garrison Villard, Eddie Rickenbacker, T. E. Lawrence and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among others. The topics range from a disquisition by a German general on the right to make war, through the invention of atrocity stories by the press and the training of black troops, to the Russian revolution and the massacre of Armenians by the Turks. Some of the writing will strike contemporary readers as naive or condescending, but the collection's most enduring impression is that journalistic writing 75 years ago was more ponderous than today's. (Jan.)