The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

Christopher Clark

Mar 2013 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this ebook

“A monumental new volume. . . . Revelatory, even revolutionary. . . . Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable.” — Boston Globe

One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)

Historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.

Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict.

Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart.

Ratings and reviews

The Sleepwalkers opened my eyes to a much more complex story behind the origination of WWI than I was aware of. It is hard to put down and reads like a spy novel, a feat in itself for a work involving such scholarship. It not only illuminates the past but indirectly helps consider afresh some elements of the history in the making today.

Chris Clark delicately reexamined the "how" of the First World War. The game of European foriegn affairs was a complex scene of interdependence and mutual paranoia. Clark delved deep into dozens of bureaucrats, ambassadors and politicians who all had a role in the making of the Great War. At times Clark looses us in his web of people that often distract from the narrative. Clark's superb use of primary sources illuminated the failing of international diplomacy to mitigate war.

This book really opens the reader to the broader causes of the first World War, namely it didn't place the blame on Germany as general thought follows. It's an incredibly well-researched book that will show you that all European powers were to some extent complicit in the causes of the war.

About the author

Christopher Clark is a professor of modern European history and a fellow of St. Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, among other books.