Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

Richard C. Holbrooke (b.1941):

• Former Ambassador to the United Nations and a career diplomat who came to prominence when he brokered a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia that led to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995.

Margaret Olwen Macmillan (b.1943):

• Received her Ph.D. from Oxford University and today is Provost of Trinity College and a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. For her work on this book, she had access to many private collections including those of her great-grandfather, Prime Minister Lloyd George. She is also the author of Women of the Raj[?], a selection of the "History Book Club." In addition to numerous articles and reviews on a variety of Canadian and world affairs, Ms. Macmillan has co-edited books dealing with Canada's international relations, including with NATO, and with Canadian-Australian relations.

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World recounts in precise detail the six months of negotiations that took place in Paris, France following World War I. The book focuses on the "Big Three" - Woodrow Wilson (United States), Lloyd George (Great Britain), and Georges Clemenceau (France) along with the role of others such as Faisal I of Iraq, Lawrence of Arabia, who joined the Arab delegation, the "Uncrowned Queen of Iraq", Gertrude Bell[?] and Ho Chi Minh who was then a kitchen helper at the Ritz Hotel who submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam.

The acclaimed book details the punishing conditions imposed on Germany and how three men rewrote the map of the world. The book also debunks one of the much-quoted theories of John Maynard Keynes who propagated the idea that the conditions imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Referred to as a landmark work of narrative history, the book was first published in Britain. It has won the Duff Cooper Prize[?] for an outstanding literary work in the field of history, biography or politics, the Hessell-Tiltman Prize[?] for History and the most prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize[?] for the best work of non-fiction published in the United Kingdom.

Without question, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 is the most honest and engaging history ever written about those fateful months after World War I when the maps of Europe were redrawn. -- Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center[?]