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superfiggy's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.25
michaelhold's review against another edition
5.0
Very good book, apart from writing on Left wing communists, that nonsense is like toxic matter to me and I always feel that I lose, time,decency, dignity and mind reading it. Makes me infurious,Whimsical.
Apart from that there is plenty knowledge of the past, good quality content.
Like six assassination :
Before 1914, six heads of the state were murdered:
- French President Marie François Sadi Carnot in 1894
-Spain premiere Antonio Cánovas del Castillo 1897
-Empress of Austria , Elizabeth in 1898
-King of Italy Umberto / Humbert I in 1900
-President of the United States William McKinley in 1901
- Second Prime Minister of Spain José Canalejas y Méndez in 1912
At a time when generations of one family lived in the same room and the children could not go out to the court because there were no clothes. Where tea is brewed between meals and cooking linen, and a cradle between unemployment and heavy duty.
When Queen Victoria died and the Victorian era came to an end.
Or of:
One hundred years after the French Revolution, there was an era of anarchism, a period of rape, two years of dynamite, dagger, rifle shots, both ordinary and eminent people died, property was destroyed, sense of security disappeared, terror spread and then settled.
Of :
Socialist - Revolutionaries killed, among others, the most hated Russian Vyacheslav Plehwe. Ultra reactionary. He arrested revolutionaries, subdued orthodox believers, limited lands, oppressed Jews, forcibly Russified Poles, Finns, and Armenians, and as a result multiplied the enemies of tsarism and convinced them of the necessity to make changes.
Or even about Peerages in the United Kingdom (Par) that were going to be replaced, with trouble of danger of misusing actual sword or divide!... vide... vide. To separate to each, own lobby (Any of several large halls in the Houses of Parliament in which MPs may meet members of the public. or a room providing a space out of which one or more other rooms or corridors lead, typically one near the entrance of a public building.)
This world before 1014 is always remembered as good, predating catastrophically times of XX c.
Jet it was just normal life with its ups and downs, not jet stretched by horror and wrongness to the extremes like war or revolution (considered back then to be War itself).
Apart from that there is plenty knowledge of the past, good quality content.
Like six assassination :
Before 1914, six heads of the state were murdered:
- French President Marie François Sadi Carnot in 1894
-Spain premiere Antonio Cánovas del Castillo 1897
-Empress of Austria , Elizabeth in 1898
-King of Italy Umberto / Humbert I in 1900
-President of the United States William McKinley in 1901
- Second Prime Minister of Spain José Canalejas y Méndez in 1912
At a time when generations of one family lived in the same room and the children could not go out to the court because there were no clothes. Where tea is brewed between meals and cooking linen, and a cradle between unemployment and heavy duty.
When Queen Victoria died and the Victorian era came to an end.
Or of:
One hundred years after the French Revolution, there was an era of anarchism, a period of rape, two years of dynamite, dagger, rifle shots, both ordinary and eminent people died, property was destroyed, sense of security disappeared, terror spread and then settled.
Of :
Socialist - Revolutionaries killed, among others, the most hated Russian Vyacheslav Plehwe. Ultra reactionary. He arrested revolutionaries, subdued orthodox believers, limited lands, oppressed Jews, forcibly Russified Poles, Finns, and Armenians, and as a result multiplied the enemies of tsarism and convinced them of the necessity to make changes.
Or even about Peerages in the United Kingdom (Par) that were going to be replaced, with trouble of danger of misusing actual sword or divide!... vide... vide. To separate to each, own lobby (Any of several large halls in the Houses of Parliament in which MPs may meet members of the public. or a room providing a space out of which one or more other rooms or corridors lead, typically one near the entrance of a public building.)
This world before 1014 is always remembered as good, predating catastrophically times of XX c.
Jet it was just normal life with its ups and downs, not jet stretched by horror and wrongness to the extremes like war or revolution (considered back then to be War itself).
beataf's review against another edition
4.0
The premise of this book is to identify the major features of the quarter century before WW1 in Europe and the US, but its exposition details life as it was, rather than life as it led up to and contributed to the war. I think this is a really helpful structure - of course looking at trends and causations is really important, and there was a general expectation of the coming war, but people weren't living with a countdown clock to battle. For me, this time always seems skipped over in survey-level history - we jump from cursory discussions of the (first) Gilded Age or the Prussian wars right through to World War 1, though this period was, I think, transformational in these regions. The book is organized in chapters by country and sometimes by actor, ie a chapter on anarchism and one on socialism, and to be clear, this is an exclusively western, geographically and conceptually limited history. It was written in the 60s and it is quite clear that she had access to more sources in some discussions, which can get tediously detailed, than others, and the anarchism chapter was particularly painful. But it is a fascinating, accessible portrait that helps ground my understanding of the top-down and grassroots political economy of the time - and guess what, we're having a lot of the same fights today.
aloyokon's review against another edition
5.0
An great book detailing the culture and politics of Europe and America in the generation before the Great War. I particularly liked the chapters on the US, France, Great Britain, and socialism.
shouperman's review against another edition
5.0
Excellent. My only wish is that this had been the first of the Great War books I read.
An excellent history, artfully written, it paints of picture of the Great powers of the world in the quarter century before it was remade.
An excellent history, artfully written, it paints of picture of the Great powers of the world in the quarter century before it was remade.
gabrielgonzalez's review against another edition
5.0
Change the names and dates, and this could be a general analysis of the things that are wrong with our society today: Rise of inequality, division of opinion, nationalism, an aristocracy disconnected of the woes of the poor, a gullible public that consumes information for entertainment rather than out of a desire to be informed to participate actively in the pursue of the common good
samferree's review against another edition
5.0
It's exactly 16 days before the centennial anniversary of World War One and I've been listening to this book while I walk to and from work. Originally, I had it in a collection of Tuchman I got from the Library of America, but I gave that copy to a friend and so I listened to it as a book on tape from the library.
The book, as Tuchman explains in the introduction, is a snapshot of the world before the first World War. She deliberately never mentions the Event itself, because to do so would make every occurrence an "cause" of the Great War instead of a culmination of effort of the people who had no idea of the coming catastrophe. That's what makes the final chapter so sad and ominous. It's about the history and rise of socialism in Europe and America and how it was essentially an optimistic perspective on human civilization and the Working Man. The socialists believed that the workers would never participate in a war in which they were pitted one against another, right up until the War began.
I can't find the quote, but in one essay of a later edition of The Proud Tower, Tuchman says something to the effect of, "We never think of World War One as our war, but it is the moment when the United States came to its majority in world affairs." It's important to remember this event and the Zeitgeist that caused it. ... And the deeply troubling thing is that a lot of the issues that led to the Great War and the Second are suddenly Up for Debate again.
The book, as Tuchman explains in the introduction, is a snapshot of the world before the first World War. She deliberately never mentions the Event itself, because to do so would make every occurrence an "cause" of the Great War instead of a culmination of effort of the people who had no idea of the coming catastrophe. That's what makes the final chapter so sad and ominous. It's about the history and rise of socialism in Europe and America and how it was essentially an optimistic perspective on human civilization and the Working Man. The socialists believed that the workers would never participate in a war in which they were pitted one against another, right up until the War began.
I can't find the quote, but in one essay of a later edition of The Proud Tower, Tuchman says something to the effect of, "We never think of World War One as our war, but it is the moment when the United States came to its majority in world affairs." It's important to remember this event and the Zeitgeist that caused it. ... And the deeply troubling thing is that a lot of the issues that led to the Great War and the Second are suddenly Up for Debate again.
theendofcinema's review against another edition
5.0
I'm sure this is the case for any era, but it was hard to read this in the heightened political climate of the last month and not see parallels between the pre-World War I period and our own time. From the entrenching aristocratic elites to the self-fracturing left, to the filibuster fight in the House of Representative to the toothless calls for international cooperation at The Hague. Even the Dreyfuss Affair recalls the Black Lives Matter movement in the way a simple matter of justice becomes perverted by political interests to the point that truth is less relevant than side-taking. Most poignant are the leftists, the socialists and anarchists convinced that capitalism would soon crumble under its own logic, themselves shattering their power on an irresolvable internal squabble between revolution and reform. Turns out that the contradictions of capitalism don't bother it so much, because capitalism doesn't care about logic. Only the left is doomed by internal contradiction.
evamadera1's review against another edition
4.0
This book was absolutely fascinating. For one thing, the narrator is fantastic. She's my new favorite female narrator probably because her voice sounds like a combination of the actress that played Harriet Smith on Doctor Who (and Isobel Crawley on Downton Abbey) and Julie Andrews.
I also really liked the approach that Barbara Tuchman took to studying this time period. Instead of focusing on the major world event, World War I, she analyzed the various social and political influences that shaped the era immediately preceding the war. Her entire narrative pointed towards build up to war. She laid out that objective at the beginning of the book and made her argument quite convincingly.
I highly recommend this book.
I also really liked the approach that Barbara Tuchman took to studying this time period. Instead of focusing on the major world event, World War I, she analyzed the various social and political influences that shaped the era immediately preceding the war. Her entire narrative pointed towards build up to war. She laid out that objective at the beginning of the book and made her argument quite convincingly.
I highly recommend this book.