Ring of Fire

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Ring of Fire by Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst, read by Alexandra Churchill.

'Churchill and Eberholst put the world back into First World War.' Dan Snow

A remarkable, eyewitness-based view of the outbreak of the First World War.

As war broke out in the summer of 1914, not a nation on Earth understood the magnitude of what they were about to face. To win it, whole populations must be mobilised, and neutrality was impossible to practice.
Our understanding of this complex conflict has been coloured by a blinkered approach to popular history. It has ignored the fact that Denmark actively participated in laying minefields as soon as war began; that the first British shots were fired in West Africa, by a black man; and the first Australian casualties occurred not at Gallipoli, but in the Pacific.
The authors have scoured the globe in search of an enormous quantity of fresh material. This is not history as told by 'great men', this is a people's view of the war, translated from more than a dozen languages to fashion a new inclusive, touching and surprising tale of events that we thought we knew...

Critics Review

Challenged everything I thought I knew about this war.
Iain Dale
Churchill and Eberholst put the world back into the First World War. They portray the astonishing scale and reach of a war that might have started in Europe but was a genuinely global catastrophe.
Dan Snow
By focussing on the immense impact the conflict had on common people – from colonial subjects to women and even children – Ring of Fire prompts a dramatic reassessment of how we should view and tell the history of this terrible war.
James Holland
An eye-opening alternative to the well worn stories of brave tommies marching off to bash the Boche.
Charlie Higson
Wears its evident scholarship lightly on its sleeves, probes deeply, casts its net wide, and amounts to the new gold standard.
1945: Victory in the West
Panoramic and revelatory ... More than half a centuryafter Barbara Tuchman's seminal The Guns of August, this intricately researched and highly readable perspective on the great war makes for a worthy successor.
The Observer
This lively account of the epic events of the opening months of the conflict highlights the chaos, uncertainty and, dare it be said, excitement of that time. Because it introduces so much new and largely unfamiliar source material, the book has a freshness to it that even readers familiar with the topic will appreciate.
BBC History

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