Compelling take on the Iron Chancellor and his steps to unify Germany. Well written, thoroughly researched and supported thesis. Great addition to European scholarship.

Netgalley has failed to send this book. Therefore I cannot read it and cannot give it a proper review. Perhaps it is a good book. Perhaps not. I will never know.

An excellent book about a surprisingly overlooked event (at least in North America). The author does a fantastic job connecting the dots between the Prussian militarism of the 1870s and it's devastating apotheosis in 1914 and 1939. The book is quite timely and pairs well with Peter Wilson's "Iron and Blood" and Holger Afflerbach's On a Knife Edge. I was particularly interested in Chrastil's discussion of 'revanche' and the devastating consequences of French emotional reaction to this defeat.

I am pleased to report that I have just completed my read of Rachel Chrastil's "Bismarck's War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe," published by Basic Books (who were kind enough to provide me with an ARC). I have recently read several books on this subject, so I had some small degree of trepidation as I approached this. I need not have concerned myself. The book upheld its promise with distinction. It is a solid military history of the war that takes a somewhat different approach from other works I have read in that the author takes pains to contextualize it as a sort of bridge between the wars that had preceded it and those that would all too soon follow it.
While looking at enough politics, both German and French, to make sense of the events related, the text then examines, in some detail, the origins of the French defeat, technologically as well as culturally. The bulk of the narrative focuses fairly tightly on military developments and carefully points out distinctions between military customs up to that time and those that seemed to manifest themselves pointedly in this particular conflict. Hostage taking and reprisals against partisans are prominent in the text as precursors of events that will later become only too familiar to modern students of military history. A good part of the book focuses on military developments that are also precursors to what might be thought of as the twentieth century German way of mobile war. The latter portion of the book sets itself apart from some texts I have read in its refusal to treat the war's conclusion as forgone after the surrender of Napoleon III at Sedan. Instead, the author looks at the consequences for both the French and the Germans of the French refusal to simply stop fighting when the Emperor surrendered himself. This leads inevitably to an examination of the Siege of Paris and its devolution into a French civil war with the advent of the Commune. Again, what is fascinating is that many books decontextualize the Commune and the events surrounding it as somehow unrelated to the larger developments in Metropolitan France and Europe. It is often treated, rather absurdly, as something that can be examined without reference to events in Europe writ large.. This text does not fall into that particular trap. The approach is refreshing and when joined to the author's clear understanding of how much of this conflict presages later events in the World Wars, events technological as well as social and political, it makes for a lively reexamination of historical events well informed by an understanding of current scholarship.