Tuchman, Barbara W. - The March of Folly (2009)

From Troy to Vietnam

London, Abacus, 2009

Paperback
13 x 20 x 3,5 cm.
559 PAGES

In The March of Folly (originally published in 1984) Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman explores one of the paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests despite the availability of feasible alternatives.
She draws on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam.
Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display.


Tuchman, Barbara W. - The Proud Tower (1967)

A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914

New York, Bantam, 1967

Paperback
10,5 x 18 x 3 cm.
615 PAGES

The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August

During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.”
In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close.

A Distant Mirror

The Calamitous 14th Century

London, Penguin, 1980

Paperback
13 x 20 x 3 cm.
677 PAGES

The fourteenth century was a time of fabled crusades and chivalry, glittering cathedrals and grand castles. It was also a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague.
Here, Barbara Tuchman masterfully reveals the two contradictory images of the age, examining the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike.
Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries and guilty passions, Tuchman recreates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, above all, knights. The result is an astonishing reflection of medieval Europe, a historical tour de force.

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American historian, journalist and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
Tuchman focused on writing popular history

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