The Sleepwalkers

By: Christopher Clark

Narrated by: Peter Silverleaf

The pacy, sensitive and formidably argued history of the causes of the First World War, from acclaimed historian and author Christopher Clark.

Sunday Times and Independent Books of the Year 2012.

The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule, and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination?

In The Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe.

©2012 Christopher Clark (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Interesting

I have read several of the author's other books and watched his TV programmes as well. I have always found them excellent. This book did not for me match his previous works. The scholarship is exhaustive in its detail as one would expect. Yet does knowing that Poincaré's boat sailed through a quiet sea on the Baltic add to our understanding? I found some of the detail did not for me contribute to much understanding of the issues.
I found some comparisons a bit specious. Comparing the NATO Rambouillet ultimatum to Serbia in 1999 with the July 1914 ultimatum to Serbia drew too long a bow for me. I missed a mention of the 1999 context of ethnic cleansing and genocide being practised by Serbia. That for me could not compare with the assassination of two Austrian aristocrats.
The performance is the first Audible one which has disappointed me. The level of the volume fluctuated a lot, especially in the first half. Sometimes the fluctuation was within a sentence. The pronunciation of some foreign names and terms was such that sometimes I could even after repetition not work out who or what was being referred to. Sometimes the pronunciation of one name varied widely from sentence to sentence. Sometimes we had Paléologue, other times Pa*êologue, other times, Paléo*ogue.
Overall I felt I had gained a more detailed understanding of the last century's fundamental catastrophe.