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.
Tag Archives: authors: barbara w. tuchman
The Proud Tower
The Guns of August
In my bold and daring effort to continue educating myself on World War I (a huge gaping hole in my education that I complain about rather frequently) I listened Barbara W. Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Guns of August, which is a book about the first month of the war.
The first chapter brings together nine world rulers at Edward VII’s funeral (King of the United Kingdom) and discusses political alliances and diplomacy of the time. Chapters two through five detail military planning and strategy of the great powers prior to the war, and chapter six through the end of the book detail the first month of the conflict, separated into the geographical Eastern and Western fronts. There are a couple of chapters devoted to the war at sea, and each world leader of the time is introduced to the reader with their personalities and strengths and weaknesses discussed.
Tuchman touches on the recurring misconceptions and mistakes made during the initial stages of the war that had catastrophic consequences for Europe, including the idea that the war would be over quickly (based on certain views of military/civilian leaders that just turned out to be inaccurate, like morale would buoy an endless offensive).
The Guns of August is/was a highly influential book when it came out – supposedly President Kennedy was highly affected by the book and insisted his cabinet read it, and it affected his thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s still frequently discussed although it’s fallen out of favor in more academic circles – I’ve read several (very long) threads on reddit about how it’s inaccurate and not a good history book (the argument being her thesis of how WWI began is no longer accepted by modern historians), with one of the arguments for it being that it’s a very good historical take on how we used to look at WWI. (The thing is, I never looked at WWI, so I have no idea).
Whether it’s a great history book or not, I enjoyed The Guns of August. I like Tuchman’s narrative style and I think a strength of the book is that it tells events in a timeline that makes it accessible to a more casual reader (like myself). I’m not a historian or a student looking to seriously study WWI, I’m more of someone looking for the outline of general picture of what happened and why on a more superficial level than a historian’s level. This book does that well and it supplements my other reading. I also like the title, but I suppose that’s not really a reason to recommend a book.
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The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution
The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution by Barbara W. Tuchman was one of my favorite history books of the year. (If Tuchman’s name sounds familiar, you probably know it because she won a pair of Pulitzer Prizes: one for her book on World War I, The Guns of August, and one for her book on General Joseph Stilwell, called Stilwell and the American Experience in China).
I’ve read a lot of books on the American Revolution – far more on that war than any other, American or otherwise. A lot of them are very well researched, which is great, but they do tend to rehash a lot of the same information and perspectives over and over, particularly when it comes to what the revolutionary generation was thinking when they crafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Few of the books I’ve read focus on military tactics – most of the reason being that after disastrously losing New York to the British, Washington’s biggest tactic was, basically, “don’t lose.” Anyway, even fewer of these books focused on British military tactics.
But Tuchman’s book did just that – she focused on the politics and the military strategy of the British during the American Revolution, which was an absolutely fascinating take on the war, since I had never seen that take before.
As it turns out, a lot of the British leadership was, well, stupid and short sighted when it came to the American colonies, including King George III. Tuchman goes into the background of many of the British military and political figures of the time, British naval tradition and protocol, and a lot of British political, military, and economic theory.
One of my favorite stories in the book relates to the title: one of the reasons the British decided the colonies had declared war was due to the use of flags to signal ships. A Dutch trading ship sent up the wrong flag signal, and boom, the Revolution had started.
I loved The First Salute. I loved it. It was well researched, informative, and funny. It also helped that narrator I was listening to (I want to say it was Nadia May but can’t swear to it) had a British accent and that dry tone that the British do so well.
If you want a refreshing view on the War for American Independence, Tuchman’s book is the way to go.
words in scarlet ink 