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Michael Creswell, A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 238 pp., $52.50 (hb), ISBN 9780674022973. Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 358 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 9780520251625. Gerard Bossuat, Les aides americaines economiques et militaires a la France, 1938-1960. Une nouvelle image des rapports de puissance (Paris: Comite pour l'histoire economique et financiere de la France, 2001), 406 pp., €22.87, ISBN 211091050X. Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 259 pp., $23.76 (pb), ISBN 7981845454159. Claire Sanderson, L'impossible alliance? France, Grande-Bretagne et defense de VEurope, 1943-1938 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), 471 pp., €32.00, ISBN 2859444815. Raphaele Ulrich-Pier, Rene Massigli (1888-1988). Une vie de diplomate, 2 vols. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 1,539 pp., $85.95, ISBN 9052012601. Helene Miard-Delacroix, and Rainer Hudemann, eds., Wandel und Integration: Deutsche franzosische Annaherungen der funfziger Jahre /Mutations et integration: Les rapprochments francoallemandes dans les annees cinquantes (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), 463 pp., €49.80 (hb), ISBN 3486578022. Francois Lafon, Guy Mollet (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 960 pp., €30.00, ISBN 9872213629216. The historical reputation of France s Fourth Republic has undergone a significant rehabilitation since the regimes largely unmourned death in 1958. Writing almost thirty years ago, the French historian Jean-Pierre Rioux announced that it was high time to re-examine the Fourth Republic what he called this 'skeleton in the

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.