paris 1919 6 months that changed the world

Paris 1919 reads like a novel, except that no novelist would be allowed so many wild characters or such dense, intertwined and fascinating plots. It displaced at least two books I had pledged to review, distracted me delightfully from a significant conference, comforted me through the delays and frustrations of modern air travel, and held my attention until the not-so-small hours of a weekday morning. Received on the eve of a busy trip to Washington, the volume took over my life. I am not sure that the ensuing decades have substantially undermined her thesis, but I would cheerfully offer Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 as a conspicuous exception.

Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later.About half a century ago, the late Hilda Neatby complained, in her contribution to the Massey Report on the State of Arts and Letters in Canada, that Canadian academic historians generally communicated poorly. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally above all they failed to prevent another war. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Summary: 'Between January and July 1919, after 'the war to end all wars,' men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace.

Paris 1919 6 months that changed the world