The first volume of a trilogy on twentieth-century world history. It is noteworthy that the century started with a war in progress. The so-called Boer War involved the British to a significant extent. This was an attempt to put down the African Boers' uprising, which was aiming to drive out the British invaders in South Africa. War was endemic in this third of a century with the "Great War" at its center. The brief respite of the "roaring twenties" is too soon followed by the beginning of the great depression in 1929. 1933 does not bode well for the future with the inauguration of FDR in the United States and the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany. ( )

3219. A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume One 1900-1933, by Martin Gilbert (read July 15, 1999) This goes year by year, even as did Edwin Emerson, Jr.'s A History of the 19th Century, which was also in three volumes (as Gilbert's will be when he has finished it) and which I read with great relish in 1962. This is, however, a much more ambitious work, tho it is based nearly entirely on secondary sources. The author is a British Jew, and he spends a lot of time on British colonial history, and of course on World War One. There are errors, like saying "a prolonged drought spreading westward from the Pacific Coast" and referring to Henry L. Stimaon in 1927 as ex-Secretary of State, instead of as ex-Secretary of War, and having FDR inaugurated on Mar 3, 1933. He devotes little attention to social trends, books, or such things. I think a more analytic approach would have been more useful and attention-holding. Much of the 33 and a third years covered is dismal and sad. But I expect I'll read Volume II. ( )

A comprehensive history of the first thirty-three years of the Twentieth Century, starting with the intervention of the Great Powers (including Britain, Germany and the United States) in China, and closing with Roosevelt as the newly-elected President of the United States and the inauguration of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. The narrative flows, in rich and compelling prose, from continent to continent and country to country, conveying the dramas, struggles and achievements of nations and individuals, as well as chronicling the diseases and natural disasters of the first third of the century, the advance of science and medicine, wars, revolutions and political upheavals

"One of Britain's foremost historians..."
-John Ramsden ( )