The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War: 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
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(Paperback)
- Pub. Date: August 1996
- 528pp
- Sales Rank: 44,123
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: August 1996
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Format: Paperback, 528pp
- Sales Rank: 44,123
- ISBN-13: 9780345405012
- ISBN: 0345405013
Synopsis
"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 provedin 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
Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War: 1890-1914by Anonymous
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May 24, 2006: Gee Barbara Tuchman is a great writer? So what else is new? She and people like Robert K. Massie have one thing in common: the wonderful writing talent and the outstanding command of written English. This book's descriptions of course are extremely accurate and well researched. Again Barbara Tuchman knew how to do this? So what else is new? I loved the chapter on Patricians. I loved the description of the British aristocracy and its sybaritic pleasures of the fin de siecle era. This class of people built an Empire, presided over it and even in their Spenglerian decline their sense of duty is admirable. They even managed to bow out of history's main stage gracefully and with class. Loved the descriptions of the Wilhelmine Germany,as well as the foolish Russian monarchic system sitting on a relatively small powder keg of intellectual revolutionaries and never even beginning to think that the mass of uneducated, illiterate peasants would just sit and watch the system go to its ruin. As usual for this author outstanding!! Too bad she died! (But then so did Cecily Wedgewood-remember her writings?)
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