http://www.housmans.com/blog/?p=2026
Renowned US author Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost, Bury the Chains) talks about his recent book ‘To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918′ – the only recent history of WW1 to foreground the anti-war movement.
Joint event with QPSW. 7pm, Friday 17 January,
Friends House, 173 – 177 Euston Road, NW1 (opp. Euston station). Free entrance.
This event will also be the launch for PN’s new
First World War project: a visual celebration of the people and movements that
opposed the First World War, largely inspired by Adam’s book http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peacenewspress/the-world-is-my-country
Over the last three decades American writer and
activist Adam Hochschild has produced a series of remarkable books on topics
including: rubber slavery in the Congo (King Leopold’s Ghost); Stalinist Russia
(The Unquiet Ghost); and the British anti-slavery movement (Bury the Chains).
His most recent book ‘To End All Wars: A Story of
the Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918′ – winner of the 2012 Dayton Literary
Peace Prize and finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award – is a
unique history of the First World War, featuring a ‘cast of characters … more
revealing than any but the greatest novelists could invent’, including
‘generals, trade unionists, feminists, agents provocateurs, a writer turned
propagandist, a lion tamer turned revolutionary, a cabinet minister, a
crusading working-class journalist, three soldiers brought before a firing
squad at dawn, and a young idealist from the Midlands who, long after his
struggle against the war was over, would be murdered by the Soviet secret
police.’
Featuring the well-known (Bertrand Russell, Rudyard
Kipling) and the little-known (Violet Tillard, John S. Clarke), the war’s
opponents (Emily’s Hobhouse, Charlotte Despard) and its staunchest advocates
(Sir Alfred Milner, John Buchan), this is a story of a story of police raids
and buried documents, of the gleeful, even mischievous, appropriation of a
pompous prosecutor’s words to be used as anti-war propaganda, and of a
Commander-in-Chief (John French, 1st Earl of Ypres) whose sister (Charlotte
Despard) was a defiant revolutionary and co-founder of the Women’s Peace
Crusade.
Join us on 17 January for a rare opportunity to see
Mother Jones’ co-founder Adam Hochschild here in the UK.
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