I've been reading up on the history of WWI lately - check the last few posts in the "books" category to see what I've been reading. After the last post on this subject, I got a number of recommendations:

• 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
• The Guns of August - this one is a classic, and it's been on my list for awhile
• Not WWI related, but deals with the issues of the preceding century: The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812-1822
• While buying the first two, the Borders clerk recommended another book to me: The
• Illusion of Victory: America in World War I
• Finally, I got this recommendation: A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

I was able to buy the first 2 and the fourth; looks like I'll have to order the others. This only adds to my impressive reading backlog - who knows when I'll catch up. I started reading the first book immediately, and it became clear in the first 100 pages that the conference was very much a work in progress - they had few examples to draw on (The Congress of Vienna had been a long time ago, and it was a simpler Europe then). The confused handling of Russia alone was fascinating reading.

The more I read about that era, the more I see where the world we live in now came from...