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
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