World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation and leaving bitter disillusion in its wake. In To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, has written an original, engrossing account of the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics. Jailed for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, while imprisoned, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. Hochschild paints vivid, painful portraits of the civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle. Adam Hochschild is an award-winning author and journalist who has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. His books, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) and Bury the Chains (2005) were finalists for the National Book Award and have won numerous other prizes. Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

Recorded Saturday, May 7, 2011 at the Newberry Library.