In my crackpot opinion World War One was the death knell of Western Civilization, with the intervening century essentially an epilogue. From C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, and J.R.R. Tolkien, to Ernst Junger, and Ernest Hemingway, this war informed much of the 20th Century’s most insightful authors, as they participated in the agonizingly horrific death or their world and its hopes and values, and came out the other side to write about man’s struggle to remain undefiled by the social and military machinery of power.

Dan Carlin’s series of Hardcore History audio books on WWI is by far the best work I have ‘read’ on the subject of the Industrial Age’s inevitable apocalyptic war. I like this even better than Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, only because he goes into greater depth where the human experience was concerned. No one could match the narrative drama of Tuchman’s classic. But Dan goes beyond and below the ‘Great Dame of history’ in a very effective attempt to infuse the listener with the sense of pervasive horror experienced by those caught up in this war, which profiles more like a pandemic than the collective and colossally stupid act it appears to be from our comfortable distance.

If you are not a history buff—think of this podcast as a novella length horror story.