One of my top pet peeves is that we are taught almost nothing about WW1 in history class. From what I recall from my AP US History class: "Archduke was shot, fighting happened in Europe for a few years, then we got involved, but it was towards the end, so it didn't really count, then the war ended, so yeah, we don't need to address this."

UGH NO. If we got involved, we should learn about the entire thing. I enjoy WW2 history as well, but I make it a point to read stuff about WW1 and expand my knowledge of that whenever I can.

Peeves of education aside, this sounds like an interesting read to add to my ww1-tbr shelf! (OOOh, cast of characters list, I love books that have those!)

We did World War 1 in half a day in my high school U.S. history class. Complete travesty. (Not a great class; we covered everything, but at the depth of about half an inch.) Worst history class I had in secondary school. (I was mostly very lucky, and for the other three years had the fabulous Mrs. Jones. We came nowhere near covering everything, but what we got to, we did in depth.)

It wasn't covered really well until college. Prof not only spent days on it, but we had an additionaly reading list and Guns of August was on it.

Oh, I had a great course on the Great War in grad school (it was a 400/600, so it was about 40 undergrads and 10 grad students). We read The Guns of August, as well as a lot of novels written about it.