Will I love A Peace to End All Peace?

To make sense of current events in the Middle East, I’d definitely put this excellent book at the top of my list. Fromkin argues that the modern Middle East was shaped by the Allies during and after World War I, not just because of their plans to remake the region, but also due to their lack of follow-through. Does the story sound familiar? While the book wraps up in 1922, the arbitrary borders drawn for Arab states, the creation of Israel, and the rise of hostile sentiments—sparked by the political moves of European powers—set the stage for many of the… show more.

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like… show more.