SOURCE: “Still Not Over Over There?,” in The Nation, August 9-16, 1999, pp. 34, 36-8.

In the following review, Koning disputes Ferguson's historical arguments in The Pity of War.

The estimates of the number of books written about World War I are in the hundreds of thousands. By my estimate, Yale University Library holds 34,000 titles published before 1977 and more than 5,000 since. (The second category is on its computer, which counts up to 5,000 only.) The bibliography of Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War lists about a thousand titles. But the author, no shrinking violet, advertises his book with the subtitle Explaining World War I.

Well, Ferguson has not so much set out to explain the war as to show why he thinks it was unavoidable and—more sensationally—why he thinks England is to blame for its not having remained a “little war” and how most of the things we...