From Nanking to Visegrad, from Manchuria to Auschwitz, the hatred in this breeze-block of a tome is shocking; and we talk of the 'darkness' of serial killers instead of governments. The Second World War takes up the bulk - there is surprisingly little on 911 or the Arab Spring which renders his argument that global warfare is over a little specious at times. Ferguson posits that the 20th century saw the decline of the West and the beginning of the dominance of Asia; it's hard to argue with after...

One of Niall Ferguson's last worthwhile books, The War of the World reexamines the Twentieth Century's cataclysms through a revisionist lens. It's a combination of well-trod events and scholarship (most of Ferguson's citations are familiar secondary sources by Richard Evans, John Toland, etc.) with a provocative approach: Ferguson places great stress on the ethnic and racial fault lines, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, that drove some societies to violent expansion (Germany, Italy, S...

Bloody brilliant....this is what revisionist history should be....a second reading has left me less enthused but still a very good book...but the descent of the West? Only if you decided America cannot be included in this. The 20th was, after all, the American century and the East did not begin its true rise until near the end of the century...mostly EU propaganda...but a very good book for all that.

Niall Ferguson's breath-taking overview of the violent 20th century is certainly worth the time taken to read it. Even with my familiarity with history, I feel that there was something to learn and contemplate on every page. While his conclusions are complex and difficult to sum up, the endless atrocities of the bloody previous century were a result of man's infinite ability to see other classes, ethnic groups, religions and tribes as enemies, and practice unconstrained mass brutality, whether d...

Brilliant! This is a very serious and dense book when Ferguson explores the deep themes of war. His main premise is that in the 50 years between the start of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904/5 and the end of the Korean War, that more humans died in conflicts that at any time in the history of mankind. He documents that opinion at length and explores major themes:- economic volatility,- ethnic conflict; and- the descent of European power.Details: Ferguson explores issues of racial tension in very s...

Typical Book written by and made for Establishment.2 out of 5 Stars. Ferguson didn't add any thing new to the historical view of "World War" but only reinforced the same old song and dance.As a Hedge Fund Investment Banker during the height of the Financial Crisis, I found "his" research a bit disingenuous that he didn't write a thing about how banks FUND most of the wars around the Globe especially when the title of this book is "The War of the World".He admits in the credits that he had at lea...

The War of the World by Niall Ferguson just astounding, almost every page has some obscure detail of some event in some war that the west was ever involved with from 1900 to 1999, so huge an undertaking surely you would need a team of researchers buckets of coffee and mountains of cupcakes. No western nation is left out Americans British French Germans Russians are all well covered but far more indepth examinations of the Germans and Russians with whole sections outlined. Other smaller western n...

The twentieth century was (among other things) an appalling exercise in mass murder, with two world wars and a fifty-year succession of proxy wars that was termed a cold war, resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths. In this fat volume (published in 2006) British historian Niall Ferguson tackles the question of what went wrong.It covers much of the same ground as Paul Johnson's massive Modern Times, another excellent survey of the disastrous century, but with a particular focus on the role pl...

I have now read four of Mr. Ferguson's works, the others being Empire, Colossus, and The Ascent of Money, and this one is by far his best work (although, Empire was great too). No other book on WWII has done what this one has done: explained WHY WWII happened and WHY it was so violent. All other books explain HOW WWII transpired, but this one cuts right to the meat of the matter. The results and conclusions are devastating to anyone with a firm belief in humanity's central goodness. Mr. Ferguson...

This is the first book by Ferguson that I've read. I was pleased with this effort--it was well-researched, and although it covers material amply familiar to any 20th century history buff, it was engaging not only because of Ferguson's fluid style but also because of his unconventional take on the causes and dynamics of human conflict and cruelty. You may or may not agree with some of his interpretations but he makes convincing arguments which make one want to research the topic in greater depth....

There is something about this guy’s work that is a little annoying. Like his The Ascent of Money, it was almost there, but not quite. I needed something on World War Two recently and saw this and bought it, but it has a much broader interest than just that conflict.The idea behind this is fascinating – pretty much that we like to think most of the conflicts of the last century were ideological, when in fact they were mostly ethnic. There is some fascinating stuff on the formation of Turkey and t...

OK today I have the time to follow up on this book. This is a bit off the cuff but for those undergraduates of you who didn't read it until the day before you were assigned to speak in front of the class it will give you some nuggets to work with.Firstly the author Mr. Furguson has a penchant for writing what one might almost call big history that is looking beyond the titles we find convenient when analyzing say the 20s or the 30s or even World Wars One and Two. This author may delve into some

Ferguson attempts to address the question of what made the 20th C so bloody with a surprising hypothesis. He says that racism and ethnic hostilities were the culprit, triggered by economic volatility and declining empires. He then, beginning with WWI and ending in current times but focusing mostly on WWII, describes the ethnic and racist aspects of major wars, minor wars, wars within wars, internal wars of totalitarian regimes, etc. He calls his premise a hypothesis, and he makes a good start at...

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied...With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter." -- H.G. Wells, The War of the WorldsNiall Ferguson, the young Oxford fellow who gratingly insist...

Pretty poor. Tries to be "controversial" and "iconoclastic" etc, but is actually a pretty standard history of WW2 with few if any new insights. What's worse, it has little logic (he often contradicts himself: at one time WW1 is shown by analysis of the financial markets to be completely unexpected and a few pages later it's the outcome of a long period of rising tension), and shows little historical sense (quite reasonably slagging off Bernard Shaw for falling for Stalin's regime, he never asks

This is not "a revolutionary look at humanity's most murderous century" so much as a scattershot economic and military history of Eurasia, 1940-1945. There's several places where Ferguson attacks other authors' claims, but targets rather dubious, second-rate literature--there's no great corrections to Shirer, or Trevor-Roper, or Beevor, or Tuchman, or any of the other accepted canon. These challenges furthermore regard "controversies" like to what depth Stalin had planed a preemptive invasion of...

The fall of Empires, says Ferguson in this impressively solid masterpiece, is generally more bloody than their rise. Even without his thorough account of a century of conflict and the extinction of the European Empires and recent rise of Asia, the conclusion would be hard to deny, as the industrial age culminated in a series of crimes so vast as to eclipse the public conscience of earlier wars. Not for nothing is the Godwin the ultimate signal that an internet thread has descended into anarchy.J...

Niall Ferguson's The War of the World has received a fair amount of "buzz." And, indeed, as one reads it, the scholarship, the knowledge of historical nuances, and the command of the sweep of the 20th century are all readily apparent. However, in the end, the book is somewhat unsatisfying. The book begins with an interesting notion, namely that life was rapidly improving as the twentieth century began. However, the puzzle addressed by Ferguson follows from that: why did the rest of the century b...

This is a book about killing. That's about it. Mostly it's about the mass extermination of humans. And the economics of killing lots and lots and lots of people. If you're interested in why people hate and kill millions of people, this might be a book for you. But there isn't even much "why" in the book. There are a lot of numbers. Pages and pages of numbers...of people...killed by the tens of thousands. There's not much else in its 646 pages. Niall Ferguson is a well-respected historian. He loo...