America's Greatest Blunder Named Major Prize Finalist

NEW YORK - March 24, 2014 - PRLog -- Prestigious Foreword Reviews has announced that America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One, by Burton Yale Pines, has been selected as a Finalist in its 16th annual “Book of the Year Awards” competition. Pines’ highly-praised account of how and why America declared war on Germany, how America won the war and why this was a huge mistake with catastrophic consequences is a Finalist in the History and War–Military categories. The key criterion for its awards, says Traverse City, Michigan-based Foreword Reviews, is a “groundbreaking work [that] stands out from the crowd.” America’s Greatest Blunder already has won four prizes including USA Best Book Awards (Winner – History/Military) and Readers, Favorite Annual Book Award (Silver Medal).

Said Pines when notified of being a Foreword Reviews Finalist: “Interest in World War One among all readers is mounting rapidly as we approach the centenary of the war’s August 1914 outbreak. And as recent tensions grow in Ukraine, the South China Sea and elsewhere, policymakers and analysts are looking to the build-up to World War One as a cautionary example.”

The book’s central argument is that America blundered greatly by entering a war that it had no reason to join. Its two million Doughboys broke the Western Front’s battlefield stalemate and won the war, thus allowing Britain and France to impose their draconian peace on Germany. Had America not entered the war, writes Pines in his book, there would have been a peace of compromise -- and thus “no punishing Versailles peace treaty, no reparations, no humiliation of Germany, no German toxic calls for revenge and therefore no Hitler, no World War Two and likely no Cold War.” Says Pines: “It indeed was America’s greatest blunder of the 20th Century.”

Publisher Weekly calls America’s Greatest Blunder “An epic exercise in historical speculation...Detailed and thought-provoking.” Kirkus Reviews says the book is a “A carefully and winningly argued case against military adventurism.” Foreword Clarion Reviews says the book is “a good primer for anyone who seeks to understand how a nation can be dragged into war.”

Availability

America’s Greatest Blunder is available in hardcover, paperback and e-formats at www.Amazon.com, www.BN.com, the Apple iBooks store, www.kobo.com and at bookstores.

The Author

Burton Yale Pines, a former University of Wisconsin (Madison) history instructor, Time Magazine correspondent and editor and onetime Washington thinktank executive, is the author of Back to Basics (1982) and Out of Focus (1993). He grew up in Chicago, attended Nicholas Senn High School and is a three-time winner of the New York Newspaper Guild’s “Page One Award for Excellence in Journalism.”

Contact

Burton Yale Pines

greatestblunder@gmail.com

212-579-3180

The book’s Amazon page is at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0989148734

Its website is: www.AmericasGreatestBlunder.com