Martin Gilbert brings readers up to date in this rich historical narrative of the contradictory events of the last fifty years. Volume II ended in 1951, as the world recovered from World War II, and the nuclear threat increased. In this volume, Gilbert recalls the Cold War and communism--including McCarthyism, the Soviet and Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall--and the wars, from Korea to Vietnam to Bosnia. He moves from Poland's Solidarity Movement to Ireland's Bloody Sunday, from Pol Pot and his killing fields to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Mao began a cultural revolution, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy were assassinated, and Beijing's Tiananamen Square shocked the world. Technology and medicine advanced in leaps and bounds as the society struggled to catch up. Art, literature, and music, as well as epidemics and natural disasters, all have their place here. Many of the events are described through the words of those who were present. As in the previous two volumes, Gi

It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would end officially almost five years later. Unofficially, it has never ended: the horrors we live with today were born in the First World War.It left millions-civilians and soldiers-maimed or dead. And it left us with new technologies of death: tanks, planes, and submarines; reliable rapid-fire machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare. It introduced us to U-boat packs and strategic bombing, to unrestricted war on civilians and mistreatment of prisoners. Most of all, it changed our world. In its wake, empires toppled, monarchies fell, whole populations lost their national identities as political systems, and geographic boundaries were realigned. Instabilities were institutionalized, enmities enshrined. And the social order shifted seismically. Manners, mores, codes of behavior; literature and the arts; education and class distinctions-all underwent a vast sea change. And in all these ways, the twentieth century can be said to have been born on the morning of June 28, 1914-- Back cover.