Great historians address fundamental questions and use the lens of the past to provide answers. Tuchman is a great historian, and the question she asks in this work is : 'Why are governments so fucking stupid?'You are the leader of a powerful trading city-state. After a ten year war, your b...
On the night of the 13th of August 1961 the Government of East Germany began to build the Wall that divided Berlin isolating its Western part within the Communist Eastern block.In 1962, Barbara Tuchman published her Guns of August and the following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.As many y...
I was a little worried at the start that 600 pages of 14th century history might be, shall we say, a bit too much. There is no denying the book is long and very detailed and at times it was a struggle, but every time I was about to give up after yet another pointless battle Tuchman would come up...
Call me a traditionalist, but I think it is reasonable to assume that a book promising to be about the American Revolution, even one claiming a "fresh approach", should have more than a passing reference to the battle for American independence. Instead, Barbara Tuchman has given us a very scholar...
In the West we like to think that we are somewhat better than the other peoples of the world. At least one of the reasons we give for this, to us at least, self-evident superiority is our Judeo-Christian heritage. This heritage is what we refer to when we need to explain our sense of justice (a...
Barbara Tuchman is a widely respected historian, and I have always assumed I'd get around to reading all her books some day (I read two of her books in my pre- Goodreads.com days). I had not previously read The Proud Tower probably because the era prior to World War I is of limited interest to m...