My Favorite WWI Research Books

I’ve spent the last five years with research books learning about The Great War, World War I, WWI.

With the 100th anniversary last month marking the start of the war, I thought I’d share some of the material which has helped, and continues to help, me understand the War to End all Wars.

(Pick your favorite name).

More than 25,000 books have been written in the last 100 years on a variety of aspects of the war.

How do you choose?

You can see many I consulted on my Pinterest board WWI Research Books.

My favorite World War I Research Books Click to Tweet

Nonfiction

For a general overview, I liked G. J. Meyer‘s A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918.

Told chronologically, as you would expect, its approach was through the major players as their “big moments” arrived. We learned about Archduke Ferdinand, for example, in the chapter about his death.

This gave me insight into the characters–many of whom I was surprisingly familiar with from books I’ve read over the years.

The chapters are short and pointed, but not overwhelming in detail.

It’s got maps, too, which I always need!

The Great Influenza:The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History  by John M. Barry was a thick yet fascinating story about the Spanish flu.

I’ve written about it here, but it continues to haunt my thinking about the end of the war. President Wilson coming down with the flu (Shh! A secret!) and not letting others do his diplomacy may very well have been why reparations against Germany were so stringent after WWI, leading directly to Hitler and WWII.

Have I mentioned I don’t care for Woodrow Wilson?

The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin.

A terrific story of 100-year-old soldiers and their memories. Rubin set out in circa 2002 to find the WWI soldiers still living, anticipating a handful of elderly men.

Instead, he found more than 200 whom he interviewed over the course of a few years. His observations were fascinating.

“Often these terribly old soldiers, 105, 110, 112 years-old could remember minute details from the battles they fought but couldn’t recall what they had for breakfast that morning.”

Baedeker’s 1914 Egypt.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I used this old book I found on line to check local details as I wrote about Cairo. Fascinating to learn the cost of the tram and what times it left Opera Square, particularly for when my heroine needed a ride out to the camps!

I learned the name of European doctors, saw intricate maps of the Egyptian Museum, and learned where to go for lunch. Invaluable for a writer, probably not of great interest for a regular reader!

Fiction

The infamous “they” say if you want to learn what happened you study political history. If you want to learn what life was like, you study historical fiction.

I read a lot of historical fiction–and wrote about it here.

One of my favorites was The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes.

This was a parallel story–the investigation of a missing art work in contemporary Britain while at the same time following what happened to that art work in 1916 France.

I’d certainly known of the Monuments Men and artwork issues in WWII France, I hadn’t realized the same thing happened in the Great War. Well written and interesting, it gave me insight into what the peasants living in the middle of the battlefields were experiencing at the time.

I read it one rainy Sunday afternoon and was totally content!

 The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Kenneally.

I actually hated this book. How can you write an enormous  novel about nurses in WWI Egypt and only use about 100 sets of quotations marks?

Maybe it’s just the way Australians write, but I was so aggravated by the far-too complicated mechanics of the book, I almost didn’t catch all the details I ultimately needed to know about (and then to research myself). If you can stand weird ways of writing, this book is insightful.

I also got insight from the Charles Todd mysteries, Anne Perry’s five-book series about WWI (third book, Shoulder the Sky, is the best one, particularly for information about trench life), Elizabeth Peters; Amelia Peabody books set during the war in Egypt and the unusual In Falling Snow by Mary Rose MacColl–a fictionalized account of a WWI hospital run entirely by women in France.

Plenty of books remain on the shelves, but this is the list that meant the most to me.

Tweetables

If you’ve read any World War I novels, research books, or others, what has stayed with you? Click to Tweet

A dozen fiction and nonfiction books about World War I  Click to Tweet