The Magazine  Over There  A historian hears the echoes of the
Great War.  Dec 8, 2008, Vol. 14, No. 12 • By ANDREW NAGORSKI
Widget tooltip Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts
The Summer the Archduke Died  On Wars and Warriors  by Louis D.
Rubin Jr.  Missouri, 184 pp., $24.95  Only death is inevitable.
Short of that nothing is inevitable until it happens, and
everything is inevitable once it has happened. The historian
deals with past events and therefore to him all history is
inevitable. But these past events were once in the future and
then they were not inevitable.  -- A.J.P. Taylor  In The Summer
the Archduke Died, Louis D. Rubin Jr. infuses his elegant,
absorbing collection of review essays with Taylor's credo. He
explains not only the vagaries of history, particularly how we
look back at wars and their origins, but also the role of those
who led their nations in those decisive moments and how their
choices determined the anything-but-predetermined outcomes. A
literary critic who spent his