The Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (2010)

I don't think I have ever really understood what happened in World War I. Ken Follett actually tries to explain it in an interesting novel format. He is only able to give us a glimpse into what the thinking was in England, Germany, Russia and the United States, but it points out the absurd reasons that brought much of the planet into this disasterous war.

We see a Downton Abbey type English family with a suffragette sister who falls in love with a German. They have a servant who is one of my favorite characters in the book. We see the trenches, the futility and huge loos of lives in trench warfare. It helped to see some similar scenes in Downton Abbey and then I felt I needed some more visual understanding, which is why I found the Eyewitness book on WWI in our children's book section.

Part of the action is in Russia, where we see the hard life of factory workers in St. Petersburg. I can't say I still understand all the events that led up to the Revolution, but I could see how in all that chaos the Baltic countries got their independence. The Western front was pretty set in a stretch between Belgium to Switzerland on the French-German border, but the Eastern front seemed to move all over the place.