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Summary:
"The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it." --Barbara W. Tuchman The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate. The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny. In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman bings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the Anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed through the figure of the self-depicted Hero, Richard Strauss; the sudden gorgeous blaze of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet and Stravinsky's music; the Dreyfus Affair; the two Peace Conferences at the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized in the moment when the heroic Jean Jaurès was shot to death on the night the War began and an epoch ended. "Tuchman [was] a distinguished historian who [wrote] her books with a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish. . . . It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration." --The New York Times "Tuchman proved in The Guns of August that she could write better military history than most men. In this sequel, she tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding, eschewing both the sweeping generalizations of a Toynbee and the minute-by-minute simplicisms of a Walter Lord." --Time
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
A classic history of the years leading up to World War I
Customer Rating:
Barbara Tuchman's books on World War I are classics and ought to be on the shelves of anyone who is a student of History for the time period prior to and during World War I. The price is terrific considering what I first paid for this book in hardbound copy when it came out.
A Little Known Period With Facinating Characters
Customer Rating:
One of the things I love about Barbara Tuchman is her ability to bring people in history to life for me. In "The Proud Tower", she gives a distinct and in depth view of people who shaped politics and the world before World War I. It is often the long decades before a major conflict that lead to the inevitability of war. Her unique coverage of the various stresses that led to the eventual assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and one of the most horrendous conflicts in history unfolds in a step by step manner. "The Proud Tower" leads seamlessly into her book "The Guns Of August" which covers just the months prior to the first shots fired. To me, history is about the characters, the people involved. Tuchman gives those people breath and life so that history isn't a collection of data but a commentary on the human condition.
interesting take on pre WWI Germany
Customer Rating:
The Chapter on Germany deals mainly with arts and humanities, mainly through a focus on Richard Strauss. But if you really think about the context Tuchman supplies, you can see something interesting.
In school, the standard view of history was that the rise of German fanaticism and Nazism owes much to the conditions that flowed from the exceptionally harsh peace terms the WWI victors imposed. Tuchman's portrait leads me to wonder about that. A lot of her material raises an inference that the attitudes and trends that led to the fanaticism were already well in place in the late 19th century and even that had there been no WWI, Germany was headed for extremism anyway, although the details might not have precisely matched what we wound up seeing. An especially interesting chapter in a generally interesting book.
Dry, but VERY informative
Customer Rating:
I purchased this book with a bit of hesitancy. I have a love/hate relationship with Barbara Tuchman's works. I thoroughly enjoy her writing style, and her attention to detail. Yet, I often can hardly stand the personal slams she includes when discussing certain historical figures.
I was pleased to find that this book contained almost none of the things which I dislike about Mrs. Tuchman. This is a work of amazing detail. It has in-depth writing about some of the most miniscule of historical figures, that I often wondered where a person could have possibly gotten this information. That being said, This book covers the intimate details in the lives of probably hundreds( I didn't count) of men and women in the period leading up to the Great War. My favorite was the chapter dealing with the Anarchist movement. I have read much about the causes of the Great War, and it's spark- the assasination of Franz Ferdinand. Yet I did not know that there was an entire movement dedicated to the overthrow of conventional society through assasination.
I have no real criticism of this book since I have a keen interest in the subjects discussed. I will say, however, that if you do not have an avid interest in Victorian Age Europe, this book will probably bore you to tears. I just felt the need to inform people of the need to understand what they are getting into if they pick up this book.
Overall pretty good...
Customer Rating:
Each chapter is really just an essay on some aspect of society between the years 1890-1914. There are eight essays each about 60 pages long on various topics like the patricians of England, anarchy and socialism, sentiments in the u.s. about isolationism or nation building, etc. The book lacks flow from each essay to the next -- that's the problem. Besides that Tuchman does an exceptional job of character analysis and the sentiment of important topics going on between those years. Recommended.
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