Download The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 AudioBook Free
"The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are just the fever chart of the individual; they don't 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 uncover what moved individuals in it."
--Barbara W. Tuchman
The fateful quarter-century leading up to the planet War I got a period when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its own hate. The age was the climax of a hundred years of the very 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 individuals, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the fantastic War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of the 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; both 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 might be impossible to learn The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration."
--The New York Times
"Tuchman proved inside the Guns of August that she could write better military history than most men. In this particular 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
