The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

Some of Tuchman’s finest writing graces her next book, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (1966). In a deluxe reader’s edition for the first time in more than a generation, The Guns of August is presented here with ten fully restored color maps and sixteen pages of photographs. Kennedy, who famously drew on the book for insight during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Guns of August can also be read as a cautionary study in the perils of brinksmanship, and Tuchman’s searching observations about the irrational escalation of conflict among states made a deep impression on President John F. Interwoven with her vivid re-creation of the German march through Belgium into France and the fierce fighting on the Eastern Front are astute characterizations of the conflict’s key military and political leaders, among them French General Joseph Joffre, German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Tuchman dramatizes the diplomatic debacles that precipitated the war and the intransigence of the German and French armies as they dogmatically adhered to their battle plans, with disastrous consequences. Nowhere are her talents more brilliantly on display than in her Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller The Guns of August (1962), a riveting account of the outbreak of World War I and the weeks of fighting leading up to the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. A shrewd portraitist, she laid bare the all-too-human failures of leaders caught in the pull of historical currents and often tragically blinded by biases of culture and temperament. Tuchman distilled the complex interplay of personalities and events into gripping narratives that combine lucid scholarship with elegant literary art. One of the best-known historians of her time, Barbara W.

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman