The Western Front: Battleground and Home Front in the ... (ISBN 0333650638)

Book Description:
This study of World War I crosses the boundaries of national histories to examine the various connections between the 400-mile-long Western Front and the home fronts of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, the United States, and other participants. A thorough reexamination of the Great War has been underway since the 1970s and this book draws on enormously rich primary and secondary sources to synthesize a complex event, rethinking the patterns of war, society, culture, and governance in the early twentieth century.

The Best Short Survey -- A Must Read!!!:
This book is an extremely well-written survey of the western front during World War I. It is a must read for any person interested in the military history of that struggle. Based on a comprehensive and impressive bibliography, it provides a cogent overview of all important aspects of this struggle. I was truly fascinated by the author's remarkable ability to provide such a complete and comprehensive exposition of salient events related to the subtle interplay between the battlefields of the western theater and the home front. It really captures the spirit of the era by means of soundly-written history.

If you want only one book on WW1...:
...look no farther, this is it. I've read quite a few, and this to me is the best by far, in a field which includes many distinguished historians (Martin Gilbert, John Keegan, A.J.P. Taylor, to name a few). In an amazingly slim volume, written in a scholarly yet approachable fashion, Professor Tooley packs in both an excellent overview (including the world before and after the war) and a quite amazing amount of information. Eschewing all the battlefield details (but hitting the high points very effectively), Prof. Tooley presents a fascinating, multi-facetted study that includes the interaction between battle front and home front, and the effect of the war on all facets of life, even popular culture. For me, one of the most fascinating asides was how many of the post-war writers indulged in fantasy writing, as a sort of refuge - Tolkien and "Lord of the Rings", Lewis and "Narnia", even Milne and "Winnie the Pooh". I found especially interesting and pertinent the descriptions of the problems of paying for a war which consumed men and munitions art a rate that nobody had ever envisaged, and the total distortions of, and subsequent lasting damage to, the world financial system produced by totally unproductive military expenditure. This has modern echoes in the enormous drain of military expenditure in Iraq on the inherently very robust US economy. The situations are naturally not identical - the US can afford Iraq and Afghanistan far better than the British Empire could afford WW1 - but the moral is, beware of military adventurism, you may get rather more than you bargained for. Prof. Tooley takes no sides in the still on-going arguments over the war (e.g., generals as "donkeys"who sought to cover their incompetence by feeding more and more men into the mincing machine v. generals who did their best in a war the like of which nobody anticipated), but presents very sensible positions at neither extreme. I found only one error, admittedly a very common one - to the best of my knowledge, Erich Ludendorff was never ennobled, so never became "von" Ludendorff. However, perhaps this is Prof. Tooley's deliberate mistake, the way Persian carpet makers are reputed to make one deliberate mistake in each carpet, because only Allah is perfect.