World War I: The Definitive Visual History, New Edition

I got this book for my son as a gift, and he absolutely loves it! It’s packed with fascinating facts and incredible visuals. Definitely a must-have for any history buff or anyone interested in learning more about World War I.

Wonderful book, giving you the entire picture of the world-changing effects of World War I. This text is tops!!

This book is amazing, it really helps you understand the topic by using a lot of details, the illustrations are so good and you can understand the technology used back then, if you want to learn more about history or have a reference book to go back, this is the one.

As I've come to expect from DK visual guides, this is a quite excellent book, visually exciting and outstanding layouts. I've been a long time WWII amateur historician but have started to become interested in WWI in recent years. This book lays out the timeline of the global events the defined WWI. I had always thought of WWI as a primarily European conflict, but this book lays out the players and politics and really shows how it touched almost every corner of the world. Even though WWII is known much better for it's technical advancements, this book does acknowledge the early advancements starting as a mainly infantry and cavalry engagment progessing to the modern ship conflicts at sea, the true beginning of armor/tank warfare, and the rapid birth of aerial conflict starting with balloons and zeppelins to true combat oriented biplanes. Gives a suitable nod to the politics and people as well as the machines that would enable us, for better or worse, to wage war.

You can’t go wrong with a DK book! The visuals are so impressive and important.

It was a gift. My husband love it.

First impression of this reminded me rather of the older TIme-Life books with how items were presented. This gives an overview of WWI, touching a bit on the years before and after. And that's how a single volume like this should be approached - an overview. World War 1 (and its causes) just can't be covered in depth in a single volume very well. There are so many pieces to a multi-continent, multi-year war that if you're looking for high detail treatments of everything, you're going to have to look elsewhere and expect to spend a good bit of time on a great many books. This volume's treatment isn't bad - it splits up events into which year (or pre or post war) they occurred in, and it touches on more than just "This battle happened here, these are the generals, these are the weapons." It does a good job of touching on some of the politics, the home front and more - reminding you that the effects of wars like this don't just affect the soldiers on the battlefield. The flip side, of course, is that most subjects are introduced and covered in two pages. Sometimes more, but they're little bite size chunks. It's also not great, to me, of really keeping you in mind of *when* each item is taking place (though some don't really have a "when," as - say - lacking food on the home front was a long term issue) other than "in this year" at the beginning, where you do get a brief timeline. It's easy to lose an anchor on "ok, all these things are happening at once." But, again, overview. I'm broadly familiar with the course and discussion of the first world war, but this did highlight some areas I hadn't really paid attention to - Romania and Hungary, for instance - which, though being covered in two pages, looks like a rabbit hole I could go down for quite some time looking into. Which is part of the value of this volume to me. There are always little extra things to discover, and a volume like this can bring them to light without seeming intimidating, leading to looking for more.

Excellent book. Love the smithsonian books. I buy these for my 14YO son who lives military history. Perfect mix of text and photos.

Quality and value for money 11 out of 10 imho. Love it. Proud to have it.

Very good book it has a lot of details

Amazing book. My son goes to it every day since he got it for Christmas. He keeps reading it bit by bit and recites what he reads with us. So many cool facts, interesting pictures, and details capture his attention beyond other WWI books. He was ready for this big one, going into deeper what happened around that war. He was very happy that we found a book that was beyond the regular way of portraying WWI, and now he could find even further details that are not in other history books taught at schools.

This book is more like textbook than a encyclopaedia. Lots of text and small images. Not for kids. I have uploaded video of this on my channel, you may see before buying

Bought it as a gift for my husband, then bought again for my son and son in law... They all love the history.