A review by mabith
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World without World War I by Richard Ned Lebow
1.0
What If books are a common thing anymore, and a world without the world wars is a common topic in them. Lebow takes a different tack than I've seen before. What I've read prviously makes me think that Germany and Austria-Hungary would have used any slight pretext for war, and lacking a good one would have created one themselves. Lebow sees them as more cautious but doesn't ever explain way.
Organization is a big problem in this book. The very last chapter "A Look Back at the Real World" actually focuses mainly on the What If world, and rather than summarizing and strengthening his positions he uses it to bring up topics he's barely addressed in the rest of the book.
He switches between the real world and What If world in the middle of paragraphs, and the only real separation comes when he talks about the differing lives of specific people in the middle chapters. He mentions changes as if he's already explained them but that explanation comes chapters later or not at all.
At times he directly contradicts himself. First he mentions in passing that JFK's older brother Joe, killed in WWII, would become president without the world wars. Then later he says JFK never would have been nominated without the wars due to pervasive anti-Catholic bias, then chapters later he's back to Joe as president, nothing about how he overcame the more severe Catholic bias of the imagined world. There were several of these contradictions.
Lebow gives a random date for the creation of a League of Nations in a world without the wars, but no explanation for why it would come about at that time. He speculates that a certain person would have been a patient of Freud solely because they were Jewish and most of Freud's patients "came from Jewish professional families," with no mention of what problems would have brought the patient there. He spends 2 1/2 pages speculating on the possible career of an artist who actually died as a teenager. I made a lot of similar notes throughout the book.
In the end he offers almost no justification for any of his ideas about the world without the wars, even the most basic ones. It almost seems like this book was an outline or proposal for a novel, rather than a stand-alone piece of non-fiction writing.
Organization is a big problem in this book. The very last chapter "A Look Back at the Real World" actually focuses mainly on the What If world, and rather than summarizing and strengthening his positions he uses it to bring up topics he's barely addressed in the rest of the book.
He switches between the real world and What If world in the middle of paragraphs, and the only real separation comes when he talks about the differing lives of specific people in the middle chapters. He mentions changes as if he's already explained them but that explanation comes chapters later or not at all.
At times he directly contradicts himself. First he mentions in passing that JFK's older brother Joe, killed in WWII, would become president without the world wars. Then later he says JFK never would have been nominated without the wars due to pervasive anti-Catholic bias, then chapters later he's back to Joe as president, nothing about how he overcame the more severe Catholic bias of the imagined world. There were several of these contradictions.
Lebow gives a random date for the creation of a League of Nations in a world without the wars, but no explanation for why it would come about at that time. He speculates that a certain person would have been a patient of Freud solely because they were Jewish and most of Freud's patients "came from Jewish professional families," with no mention of what problems would have brought the patient there. He spends 2 1/2 pages speculating on the possible career of an artist who actually died as a teenager. I made a lot of similar notes throughout the book.
In the end he offers almost no justification for any of his ideas about the world without the wars, even the most basic ones. It almost seems like this book was an outline or proposal for a novel, rather than a stand-alone piece of non-fiction writing.