As a follow up to The Guns of August, I listened to The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890 – 1914, which Barbara W. Tuchman published as a sequel to The Guns of August, so I feel like I did this in the correct order.

The Proud Tower isn’t so much a cohesive narrative book as much as a series of essays Tuchman published in various periodicals collected in one volume, and each describes a different part of the world in the 25 years prior to the outbreak of the war, focusing on political, cultural, and economic climates in various regions of the world of the time.

This book was informative although extremely disconnected, which I suppose makes sense as the pieces in it were all originally separately published. Each chapter did have a main idea and one difference between this book and The Guns of August was that this book had a chapter devoted to the United States, with Tuchman’s central idea for the chapter that the USA gave up its century plus policy of neutrality and pacifism to embrace the imperialistic attitudes of nineteenth century Europe.

I found this book interesting although the lack of overall message/theme renders it a bit useless as anything but exactly what it is – a collection of essays. That said, as usual I liked Tuchman’s writing, humor, and the way she presented information in an accessible way. It’s a good popular history of supplemental reading. Again, as someone whose knowledge of European history from 1800 – 1914 is spotty at best, any popular history book that can hold interest and provide insight into the world during that time is a valuable resource (presuming of course, it isn’t completely wrong). Tuchman’s book does that.

Final note: the title of the book comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The City in the Sea.’ The passage reads While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down.

Tagged: authors: barbara w. tuchman, books: the proud tower, genre: history, genre: non-fiction