As July turned to August in 1914, all the Great Powers of Europe mobilized their armies and then went to war with one another. It would take more than 50 months for peace to return, and the better part of a century to heal many of the wounds. Germany acted only near the end of a chain of actions by other nations, but German troops moved first and set the pattern for the war. They smashed through neutral Belgium before thrusting deeply into France, coming close to knocking France out of the war, and soon were making huge inroads in Russia as well. It was a remarkable performance for an army outnumbered by its foes. Yet four years later the German Empire was swept away, its army a shell, its people starving, its government in chaos. How did the leaders of Imperial Germany come to make the decisions that committed their nation to an all-or-nothing war based on a highly risky strategy? This book explores the background of the decisions, what those who made them knew and thought, what they failed to look at and why. It explains the Prussian Great General Staff (Großer Generalstab) and the part it played in planning and preparing for war. It follows the action of August and the first part of September 1914 to show where they went wrong and how other options could have achieved Germany’s aims with far lower risk and cost. These options were realistically available and the book probes why the nation’s leaders failed to consider or rejected them. The German leaders in 1914 weren’t Hitler. They valued security over conquest and didn’t go to war to expand their empire. They weren't the first to light the fuze that led to war. They thought and acted as leaders very often do. We can understand them in terms of patterns we see all around us, patterns we even see in ourselves. Their decisions had results that were uniquely catastrophic, but the way they were reached was quite ordinary. The Plan That Broke the World explains it all briefly and crisply, in non-technical terms, drawing on the latest research. There are 35 images, many unique to this book, to illustrate specific aspects of the story. Four charts and thirteen high-quality maps, all but one drawn especially for this book, present complex information in forms that are immediately understandable. There’s no other book like it. The book Web site is whatweretheythinking.williamdoneil.com/theplanthatbroketheworld The Plan That Broke the World is a case study in the What Were They Thinking? series. The series Web site is whatweretheythinking.williamdoneil.com/

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From one of the worlds most trusted experts on personal finance comes a "route planner," identifying easy moves to get young people on the road to financial recovery and within reach of their dreams.

An engaging narrative about the political fight over the League of Nations in the US.

Briefly surveys more than two centures of American political history to describe how the country has been broken spiritually, politically and financially and advocates a return to core values to restore America's economic and spiritual health.

From America's most trusted financial advisor comes a comprehensive guide to a new and utterly sane financial choice. In Die Broke, you'll learn that life is a game where the loser gives his money to Uncle Sam at the end. There are four steps to the process: Quit Today No, don't tell your boss to shove it...at least not out loud. But in your head accept that from this day on you're a free agent whose number one workplace priority is your personal bottom line. Pay Cash You should be as conscious of spending as you are of saving. Credit should be a rarely used tool for those few times (buying homes and cars) when paying cash is impossible. Don't Retire Your work life should be a journey up and down hills, rather than a climb up a sheer cliff that ends with a jump into the abyss. Die Broke It sounds terrifying, the one intolerable outcome to your financial life. And yet, in truth, dying broke might be your best option for a life without fear: fear of failure and privation now, fear of impoverishment in the long run.

Familiar though it seems in many ways, we are much less clear about what the Great War was actually about. It stands in sharp contrast to the Second World War, which we usually think of (not, let it be said, entirely accurately) as a war to stop the spread of Nazism. Since most people see Nazism as a uniquely evil creed, the Second World War, for all its many moral compromises and double standards, remains for most people a Just War: we know which sides were the 'Good Guys' and which the 'Bad'. No such certainty holds good for the First World War. Beyond a vague awareness that the Germans invaded Belgium (and even this is eclipsed in popular consciousness by the 1939 German invasion of Poland) few people nowadays could pinpoint exactly why Britain entered the war, and fewer still could say why the war needed to go on as long as it did. The manner in which the First World War broke out has long been the subject of satirical comment. Oh! What a Lovely War!, Joan Littlewood's celebrated 1964 Theatre Workshop production, later filmed by Richard Attenborough and still regularly performed in amateur productions, presented the outbreak of war in scathingly comic terms, as a falling-out among heavily caricatured national stereotypes. In the BBC TV satirical show Blackadder Goes Forth, Captain Blackadder gives a fairly accurate overview of the alliance system designed to prevent war breaking out in Europe but adds that this plan contained just one tiny flaw: 'It was bollocks'. Since satire has a way of settling in the memory more securely than the truth ever can, it is perhaps worth getting clear at the outset a rather more accurate outline of the events that resulted in a general European war breaking out in August 1914.