The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (Hardcover)

by Anthony Read (Author)
Key Phrases: police presidium, persons should keep indoors, time for mollycoddling, Lloyd George, United States, Red Army (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Read (The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle) offers a lucid, gripping history of how the leaders of Western democracies reacted to the Russian revolution. Bolsheviks made clear their intention to unleash a worldwide revolution, and Churchill and others feared similar uprisings on their own soil. On December 30, 1918, bombs exploded at the houses of prominent Philadelphia businessmen and civic leaders. Fearing this was a Bolshevik attack, Philadelphians warned that other cities might come under the radicals' fire next. In Britain, unemployment was on the rise and worker morale was plummeting. Strikes rocked cities from Glasgow to Seattle. When workers and peasants in Spain began organizing, local estate owners blamed Red Russia, as did foreign journalists, like the French correspondent who opined that [a] wave of Bolshevism is passing over Andalusia. That spring also saw a spike in American panic about radicalism—when an alert postal worker barely managed to avert mailing out more than a dozen bombs in New York, everyone noticed that the bombs would have arrived around May Day. This sweeping, brilliant history, which travels from Turin, Italy, to Winnipeg, Canada, makes one crucial year in the history of global politics and labor come alive and has obvious resonance with the present moment. 16 pages of illus. (Mar.)
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Product Description

“We are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire.”—President Woodrow Wilson, 1919 While the Western leaders were hammering out a peace treaty in Paris to end the Great War, a new war had already begun. Bolshevism—the creed of the Russian Revolution—had burst on the scene in 1917 and seared itself into the world’s consciousness even faster than al-Qaeda would some eighty years later. The Allied powers tried to destroy it at its source by intervening, controversially and unsuccessfully, in the civil war in Russia. Elsewhere there were bloody revolutions and bloodier counterrevolutions in Germany, Hungary, and the Baltic States; massive strikes and civil unrest broke out in Britain, Western Europe, and in both North and South America. In the United States, a series of terrorist bombings created a wave of hysteria, later labeled the Great Red Scare, that threatened the very foundations of a free and democratic society. This book chronicles and examines the running battle with terror during the most revolutionary year since 1789.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (March 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061248
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061246
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #698,731 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Bolsheviks are coming"!, June 9, 2008

By	Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This well-written book should be read in conjunction with "Savage Peace" by Ann Hagedorn, which I reviewed on June 28, 2007. They both offer insights into what was happening in the U.S. right after the end of World War I, and particularly the hysteria caused by the Russian Revolution. There are some of the same incidents in both books, but this latest one goes beyond happenings in the U.S., and gives us views of events in Europe, where the fear of a Communist take-over was much more reality-based. This was a very nervous time, and the author captures that feeling quite well. I learned many things that I did not know, not only about my own country, but about European events and countries. It only goes to show that one's education is never complete, particularly as it applies to history. I don't think that I will ever stop learning something new until I am, for one reason or another, unable to read anymore.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Filling in the Gap, April 5, 2008

By	R. Mansmann (Boonton, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I thought I was somewhat familiar with events in America in 1919, but this book put a lot of information in perspective... really gave me an understanding of the collapse of the German government and the unceratin foundations of the new central European countries> iwas a bit disappointed by the limted information about the Russian Civil War, but all in all, a good book about particulars in a period that most works have omitted.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The World On Fire, October 7, 2008

By	Charles A. Reap Jr. (Pittsboro, NC USA) - See all my reviews

For a guy with only a casual interest in history, I must say this was a dull and difficult book to read. I had thought it would clarify how Bolshevism came to be so feared. However, in spite of whatever facts within might be true, I was lulled to sleep all too often and had some difficulty keeping the trend going. Hard to recommend. Charles A. Reap, Jr., author, "Devil's Game," and "My Friend Sam."