How Wilson and Lenin Shaped the World

Arthur Herman is most famous for his bestselling book from 2001, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, but he's started to find a pattern in writing history based around the collision of two great figures. The Cave and the Light, published in 2014, pitted Plato against Aristotle, and his 2008 book Gandhi and Churchill was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for its dramatic examination of empire. Herman continues in that vein in his authoritative new book, 1917. Subtitled Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Order, it zooms in on Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, and how these very different leaders embodied — and clashed with – the vast historical forces that swept the globe that fateful year.