La Gran Guerra. Foro sobre todo lo relacionado con la Primera Guerra Mundial.

Jesús Hernández · Publicado: Lun Abr 21, 2008 1:07 am **Asunto**: La Gran Guerra, de John Morrow

El sábado vi en la mesa de novedades del FNAC el libro LA GRAN GUERRA, de John Morrow, creo que publicado por Edhasa. Valía 38 euros. Como estaba plastificado no pude hojearlo. Alguien sabe si vale la pena?
Saludos!
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"El patriotismo es el último refugio de los canallas"
Senderos de gloria (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

H.P.Lovecraft · Publicado: Lun Abr 21, 2008 4:31 pm **Asunto**:

Te me has adelantado. También la he visto yo, y al ser de Edhasa (que para mi tiene buena fama y buen gusto) estuve tentado a, pero esperaré el consejo de los "siper-tacañones". Qué me puedo encontrar aquí? Con todas las historias generales que ya tengo del conflicto, éste es una redundancia o merece la pena?
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"La más antigua e intensa emoción que conoce la humanidad es el miedo"
Love, dile a Craft que se tranquilice Bruno dixit

Poilu · Publicado: Lun Abr 21, 2008 7:16 pm **Asunto**: Si es...

Buenas tardes,

Si es la traducción de la obra The Great war: an imperial history, se pueden consultar fragmentos extensos en Google books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=X21CuFREBCIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=morrow+great+war&hl=es&sig=h7hx1RzbNMAJu01caUzyrHEfktc
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Poilu · Publicado: Mar Abr 22, 2008 1:15 pm **Asunto**: Pasé por el FNAC

Buenos días,

Pasé por el FNAC de plaza Catalunya esta mañana. Lo estuve hojeando y efectivamente es la traducción de su libro en inglés ... que podéis ver en Google Books. Los 38 eurillos hacen daño. Mi ángel de la guarda me ha dicho que me lo compra esta tarde porque mañana es el día de St. Jordi en mi tierra, en el resto del mundo el "Día del libro". Me resisto aún porque parece uno más, aunque igual me equivoco. Se trata de un buen "tochete", la fuente de las letras es más bien grande, y el apartado gráfico pobre. No he encontrado ninguna reseña reseñable que aporte una opinión leída... igual miraré esta tarde JSTOR a ver si hay alguna.

P.D.: Por cierto, Jesús, al lado de este libro encontrado un tuyo sobre la Guerra de Secesión. Felicidades. Laughing

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H.P.Lovecraft · Publicado: Mar Abr 22, 2008 4:17 pm **Asunto**:

Yo después de varias mini-enciclopedias y libros monográficos dedicados a la Gran Guerra en general (un relato cronológico de la contienda) me cuesta hacerme con otro, corriendo el riesgo de que sea más de lo mismo. Estuve, al igual que vosotros, buscando reseñas por internet pero no saque nada. Merece o no la pena? Quién es el "valiente" que da el paso?
_________________
"La más antigua e intensa emoción que conoce la humanidad es el miedo"
Love, dile a Craft que se tranquilice Bruno dixit

Poilu · Publicado: Mar Abr 22, 2008 7:11 pm **Asunto**: Reseñas

Saludos,

Os adjunto algunas de las reseñas de la obra de John Morrow en prensa extranjera. Hay muchas más, pero estas son representativas de lo que he visto.
Entiendo que el problema es el idioma, pero con permiso de los especialistas en el ramo, las tres que os muestro vienen a afirmar que la obra de Morrow se centra sobretodo en los escenarios extraeuropeos, haciendo hincapié en la argumentación colonial-imperialista, y centrándose en aspectos también relacionados con el llamado frente doméstico en los diferentes países contendientes.
Siento resumir tanto, pero voy justo de tiempo.

Otro hecho a destacar es que John Morrow es mas conocido por su otra obra:
The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921
Os dejo también un enlace con un documento en .pdf muy interesante del mismo autor en el que hace un breve regesto:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj96/win96/morrow.pdf

Reseñas

The Great War: an imperial history by John Morrow jr.
How the race for empire tore Europe apart

Richard Vinen, en The Independent, 20 November 2003
The first World War began and ended with empire.

The conflict was caused partly by German resentment at the extent of the British empire.
The first World War began and ended with empire. The conflict was caused partly by German resentment at the extent of the British empire. At the Paris peace conference, the German, Austrian and Ottoman empires were broken up as the victorious allies supported the nationalism of new states in Poland and Czechoslovakia. But, outside Europe, they opposed nationalism and refused a Japanese request that racism be condemned.
Between these two dates, however, empire figured little in the conflict. The great battles were all fought in Europe. If the average British person knows anything about the First World War outside Europe, their knowledge probably comes from William Boyd's novel The Ice Cream War.
John Morrow seeks to remedy this with an explicitly imperial history of the war. His work is lively, informative and based on a lifetime of reading. He describes the campaigns in Africa, and the role of non-European (and African-American) troops in the armies of the Western allies. The Americans often assumed that black units would be unfit for combat; the French believed their Senegalese soldiers were particularly effective warriors (rather confirmed in 1940, when these soldiers were almost the only men in France to hold out against the Wehrmacht). Left-wing Englishmen sometimes believed that the use of black troops against Germans was an atrocity.
At times the multiple ambitions of this book conflict. An emphasis on cultural history often takes Morrow back into a conventional Eurocentric view. We get little sense of how African and Indian soldiers understood the cataclysm into which they were thrown.
His analysis is also sometimes rooted in simple notions of exploitation and racism. There is not much allowance for differences. America was more racist than France: Woodrow Wilson's wife refused to bring her black maid to the Paris peace conference, to prevent her getting ideas above her station. The British empire became more racist as a result of the First World War, giving new prominence to white populations in parts of the empire (such as Australia and South Africa) which were very racist. Jan Smuts, a leader of the defeated Boers, became an architect of the Paris settlement.
Nor is there much sense that non-European inhabitants of the empire might have participated in the Great War out of rational self-interest. Did not the Indian princes subsidise the British war effort because it suited them for the empire to survive? Yet Morrow's history will give readers reason to think about a wide range of issues: not least the possibility that, during and after the First World War, Europeans began to apply to one another the brutality they had formerly reserved for their African subjects.
Richard Vinen's 'A History in Fragments: Europe in the 20th century' is published by Abacus

The Great War: an imperial history by John Morrow jr.
Stanley Hoffmann, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004

Morrow examines World War I as a global conflict among the empires created by western European nations. He accordingly devotes much of his attention to the fighting that took place outside of Europe, including the role of soldiers drawn from colonies and the many manifestations of racism by the colonial powers' armies. He also conveys the tremendous magnitude of the tragedy by examining the domestic dislocation caused by the war. Given such a large scale, it is not surprising that Morrow's characterizations of individuals are sometimes too summary and his generalizations too sweeping; for example, it is not exactly true that, in 1914, all European powers were equally nationalist, racist, imperialist, and war-obsessed. Although "aggression and fear" may well have "saturated the entire imperial world view," this does not mean that the desire to expand empires around the globe was the main cause of the war. These flaws are less important, however, than Morrow's success in conveying the global dimension and internal effects of a war waged on a scale previously unknown, with consequences that are still very much with us, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The Great War: An Imperial History. By John H. Morrow Jr.
Dennis Showalter, review en Technology and Culture 46.1 (2005) 222-223

John Morrow, Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia, is best known for his work on airpower in the Great War. In this work he expands his perspective significantly and successfully by addressing the synergies that developed between "the West and the rest" in the crucial years from 1914 to 1918.
Morrow interprets the war's causes in the context of an imperialist mind-set, culminating in the nineteenth century, which reflected a fundamental determination to exploit the resources of a targeted region combined with a sense of superiority toward that region's inhabitants and their cultures. The result was a "might makes right" attitude, a glorification of war, and a growing fear of other "races," even European neighbours, as mortal threats that sooner or later must be confronted in arms. A toxic blend of fear and aggression suffused and undid Europe, leading its people to follow their governments into an orgy of violence and beginning the dual process of destroying Europe's hegemonic status and opening the door to freedom for the West's imperial victims.
The Great War was a paradox. On one hand its outcome depended essentially on events in a single region: northern France and Flanders, the traditional "cockpit of Europe." Only there, and in northwestern Europe generally, was the social, political, and economic infrastructure sufficiently developed to support and sustain high-tech warfare. Outside that zone, and particularly outside Europe, warmaking tended rapidly to revert to traditional models in everything from logistics through medicine to tactics. At the same time, the Great War was a global war, impinging more directly on non-Western cultures than any conflict in history. Airplanes flew above India's northwest frontier, and columns of Ford trucks traversed the deserts of Mesopotamia. Horses and armored cars cooperated in the Palestine campaign. Above all, a war begun in Europe, for European reasons, drew into its orbit the men and women of Africa and Asia.
Some were brought to Europe's stage center in uniforms; their grave markers and monuments stand yet, lonely and incongruous in the countrysides of Belgium and Picardy. Others were laborers behind the front lines, Chinese and African Americans; still others, replacements for European men on the farms and in the factories. As early as 1916, 10 percent of the workforce in France's crucial war industries were foreigners or colonials. Still other imperial subjects fought or labored in or near their own homelands, from Afghanistan to Morocco, at the behest of imperial masters. A forgotten but significant minority served in what were dubbed "secondary theaters," though they were no less deadly for that designation: Nigerians in East Africa, Gurkhas and Punjabis in Palestine, Vietnamese in Salonika. Black Americans, rejected by a segregated army, won glory in French uniforms under French colors.
Morrow is particularly successful in demonstrating the failure of those who led Europe's armed forces to understand the interrelations of specific technological factors that precipitated gridlock not only on the battlefield but at operational and strategic levels as well. The balance of mobility, protection, and firepower had shifted so drastically in favor of the latter that the only solution seemed to be: more of everything—but especially men.
Nor must the men be Europeans. Even before the war, France had planned to import soldiers from its North African colonies to counterbalance German superiority in numbers. Britain shipped an army corps halfway round the world from India. In both cases this was a shock and a challenge to imperialism's fundamental premise: the white man's inherent martial superiority. Outside of Europe the imperialist powers depended increasingly on their subjects to wage war at all. The numbers of white rank-and-file steadily declined, though officers' appointments remained a European prerogative. But the trenches consumed all colors, and the diseases of Africa and the Middle East spared none. Had the war lasted into 1919, non-Europeans would by necessity have played a much more significant part in all of its aspects.
That did not mean that the color line W. E. B. DuBois described as the essential problem of the twentieth century would have been voluntarily modified. Morrow argues powerfully that the Great War may have been global, but its mainspring was Europe's determination to rule the rest of the world.

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Jesús Hernández · Publicado: Mie Abr 23, 2008 12:16 am **Asunto**:

Bueno, yo me espero a la opinión de algún valiente que se gaste los 40 euros, y luego ya veremos a ver.
_________________
"El patriotismo es el último refugio de los canallas"
Senderos de gloria (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

Novilis · Gefreiter Registrado: 20 Feb 2008 Mensajes: 11

Hola,

Nosotros lo hemos comprado, en cuanto esté leído y reseñado os aviso. Será en un par de semanas o así, más o menos.

Saludos.
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www.novilis.es
Libros de historia, historia naval y militar

Pablorojo · ER Kombat Registrado: 31 Ene 2007 Mensajes: 497

Yo he decidido no comprarlo, tengo problemas de espacio y este año los gastos en libros hasta la fecha han sido cuantiosos.

A menos que los que comenten el libro informen que es imprescindible, cosa que dudo en un libro de este tipo.

Saludos.
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" El Zar lo ordena y Dios lo permite ". Antiguo proverbio ruso.

Poilu · Publicado: Vie May 02, 2008 11:31 am **Asunto**: Haces bien Pablo

Haces bien Pablo, ahórrate el dinero ya que no ni mucho menos es imprescindible. Mi ángel de la guarda me lo compró el dia de St. Jordi, llevo ya un tercio del libro, y bueno... No creo que vaya a mejorar hasta el grado de recomendarlo sin dudarlo.
Hay temas que se me escapan, en vez de hacer una traducción de un clásico como el de Keegan o Liddell Hart... Debe ser tema de derechos, porque sino no lo entiendo...
Hace medio año compré la traducción francesa de la First World War de Keegan, me costó 6 euros en paperback, editada por Tempus.
Un chollazo ... claro está para los que lean francés, pero aún así es otra dimensión editorial.
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H.P.Lovecraft · Publicado: Dom May 04, 2008 4:29 pm **Asunto**:

Poilu · Publicado: Mar May 06, 2008 10:25 am **Asunto**: A rectificar

Saludos,

Siento autocitarme, pero la ocasión lo reclama:
Poilu escribió:

Pablorojo · ER Kombat Registrado: 31 Ene 2007 Mensajes: 497

Poilu · Publicado: Mar May 06, 2008 11:26 am **Asunto**: Vendedor de bíblias usadas

Pablo Rojo escribió: