Adam Hochschild is an author and journalist, he is a frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference. Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He looks at how WWI was a divisive issue for Britain.
Adam Hochschild began his journalism career as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Subsequently he worked for ten years as a magazine editor and writer, at Ramparts and Mother Jones. Freelance articles of his have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. He is the author of seven books, mostly on subjects to do with human rights, including King Leopold’s Ghost and Finding the Trapdoor, a collection of his magazine pieces. His recent book, Bury the Chains, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has consulted for the BBC and taught writing workshops for working journalists in the U.S., Britain, Zambia, South Africa and India.Mr. Hochschild’s most recent work is To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, published in May, 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is an analysis of how the war divided loyalties in Britain and led all involved into a hopeless morass.
Here is Adam Hochschild on the book’s thesis:
“I’ve long been obsessed and fascinated by the war, for it remade our world for the worse in almost every conceivable way. In addition to killing approximately 20 million soldiers and civilians, the war also ignited the Russian Revolution, sowed the anger that allowed Hitler to seize power, and permanently darkened our outlook on human nature and human self-destructiveness. But also I’ve always seen the war as a time when men and women faced a moral challenge as great as that faced by those who lived, say, in the time of slavery. Tens of thousands of people were wise enough to foresee, in 1914, the likely bloodshed that a war among the world’s major industrial powers would cause—and, courageously, they refused to take part.
“Most books about any war, including this one, tell the story as a conflict between two sides. Instead, I’ve tried to tell the story of 1914–1918 as a struggle between those who felt the war was something noble and necessary, and those who felt it was absolute madness.”
This talk was recorded August 8, 2011 at Point Lookout in Northport.