Rachel Chrastil – författare

'Superb on the human consequences of war, ravishing in its evocations of wartime life' The Times'Compassionate and thought-provoking history' Daily TelegraphLess than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe's pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.Bismarck's War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century.Drawing on a remarkable variety of sources, Chrastil's book explores the military, technological, political and social events of the war, its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war, however successful, has profound consequences for both victors and victims.

In How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children, Rachel Chrastil explores the long and fascinating history of childlessness, putting this often-overlooked legacy in conversation with the issues that childless women and men face in the twenty-first century. Eschewing two dominant narratives, that the childless are either barren and alone, or that they are carefree and selfish, How to Be Childless instead argues that the lives of childless individuals from the past can help all of us expand our range of possibilities for the good life. In uncovering the voices and experiences of childless women from the past five hundred years, Chrastil demonstrates that the pathways to childlessness, so often simplified as "choice" and "circumstance," are far more complex and interweaving. Balanced, deeply researched, and richly realized, How to be Childless will empower readers, parents, and childless alike, to navigate their lives with purpose.

When war broke out between France and Prussia in the summer of 1870, one of the first targets of the invading German armies was Strasbourg. From August 15 to September 27, Prussian forces bombarded this border city, killing hundreds of citizens, wounding thousands more, and destroying many historic buildings and landmarks. For six terror-filled weeks, “the city at the crossroads” became the epicenter of a new kind of warfare whose indiscriminate violence shocked contemporaries and led to debates over the wartime protection of civilians.The Siege of Strasbourg recovers the forgotten history of this crisis and the experiences of civilians who survived it. Rachel Chrastil shows that many of the defining features of “total war,” usually thought to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, characterized the siege. Deploying a modern tactic that traumatized city-dwellers, the Germans purposefully shelled nonmilitary targets. But an unintended consequence was that outsiders were prompted to act. Intervention by the Swiss on behalf of Strasbourg’s beleaguered citizens was a transformative moment: the first example of wartime international humanitarian aid intended for civilians.Weaving firsthand accounts of suffering and resilience through her narrative, Chrastil examines the myriad ethical questions surrounding what is “legal” in war and what rights civilians trapped in a war zone possess. The implications of the siege of Strasbourg far exceed their local context, to inform the dilemmas that haunt our own age—in which collateral damage and humanitarian intervention have become a crucial part of our strategic vocabulary.