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The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 Spiral-Bound | March 16, 2021

Philip Zelikow

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This revealing historical examination looks at the pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War, when all sides—Germany, Britain, and America—believed the war could have been concluded and changed the course of history.​
Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world.
 
Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history.
 
The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 1541750950
Item Weight: 1.3 lbs
Dimensions: 6.7 x 1.5 x 9.7 inches
"Marvelous. What a well-wrought and haunting book this is.   Philip Zelikow lucidly recounts and dissects how the worst consequences of the war of 1914-1918  almost came to be averted.   He shows how leaders in both belligerent camps and the neutral United States strove mightily to end that conflict in 1916 and early 1917. This is a must-read book for understanding World War I and its consequences."—John M. Cooper Jr, Emeritus Professor University of Wisconsin-Madison
Phillip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, both at the University of Virginia. A former career diplomat, he was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He worked on international policy in each of the five administrations from Reagan through Obama.
 
Philip Zelikow lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.