Overview

"The twentieth century is usually seen as ""the century of total war."" But as the historian David A. Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships--in the age of Napoleon. In a sweeping, evocative narrative, Bell takes us from campaigns of ""extermination"" in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields where tens of thousands died in a single day. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction. It was during this time, Bell argues, that our modern attitudes toward war were born. Ever since, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound tightly together in the Western world--right down to the present day, in which the hopes for an ""end to history"" after the cold war quickly gave way to renewed fears of full-scale slaughter. With a historian's keen insight and a journalist's flair for detail, Bell exposes the surprising parallels between Napoleon's day and our own. The result is a book that is as timely and important as it is unforgettable."

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David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton. Born in New York and educated at Harvard, Princeton, and the �cole Normale Superieure, he previously taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as dean of faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of three prize-winning books, including The First Total War. Trained and coached by top industry talent, Trenton Bennett has performed and produced audiobooks for a wide range of genres, including science fiction, inspirational, Christian, military adventure, fantasy, humor, children's fiction, and descriptive audio. Trenton has a home studio. He is a graduate of The Accents Class with Jim Johnson and is capable of performing character voices and dozens of accents and dialects (his current record is fifty-eight unique characters). His background includes some stage performance and a wide variety of voice-over work, including e-learning, commercial, radio imaging, medical narration, and IVR.

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