Military Review English Edition May-June 2014 | Page 96

WE RECOMMEND
THE GREAT WAR SEEN FROM THE AIR:
In Flanders Fields, 1914–1918

Birger Stichelbaut, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, Belgium, 2014, 352 pages, $74.81

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ERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY WAS a relatively new technology at the onset of World War I
and was embraced as an indispensable tool of wartime intelligence by all nations involved
in the conflict. This illuminating volume, the results of a collaboration between the In Flanders
Fields Museum, Ypres, the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Royal Army Museum, Brussels,
features hundreds of photographic case studies, illustrating in unprecedented detail the physical extent of World War I and the shocking
environmental damage it left in its wake. Supplementing aerial images with maps, documents, and photos taken from the ground, this
one-of-a-kind visual record stands as an important contribution to World War I history, revealing the wartime landscape of Flanders Fields
as rarely seen before. From the publisher.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD

A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
Jurgen Osterhammel, trans. by Patrick Camiller, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ,
2014, 1,192 pages, $29.67

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MONUMENTAL HISTORY OF the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who
has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition.
He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the “long nineteenth century,”
taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion,
from the perils and promise of Europe’s transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet.
Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing
relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the
emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and
much more. From the publisher.

CHURCHILL’S BOMB: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First
Nuclear Arms Race

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Graham Farmelo, Basic Books, New York, 2013, 576 pages, $21.76

ERHAPS NO SCIENTIFIC development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet the 20th century might have turned out differently had greater influence over
this technology been exercised by Great Britain, whose scientists were at the forefront of research into nuclear
weapons at the beginning of World War II.
As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill’s Bomb,
how the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country’s lead and was
slow to realize the Bomb’s strategic implications. He also failed to capitalize on Franklin Roosevelt’s
generous offer to work jointly on the Bomb, and ultimately ceded Britain’s initiative to the Americans.
Development and deployment of the Bomb placed the United States in a position of supreme power at the dawn of the nuclear age.
Contrasting Churchill’s often inattentive leadership with Franklin Roosevelt’s decisiveness, Churchill’s Bomb reveals the secret history of the
weapon that transformed modern geopolitics. From the publisher.