The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman
The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman
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The Proud Tower
A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

Narrator: Wanda McCaddon

Unabridged: 22 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/26/2005

Synopsis

The fateful quarter century leading up to 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 to that point in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.Barbara Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: 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; two peace conferences in the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of socialism, epitomized by the death of heroic Jean Jaurès on the night the war began and an epoch ended.

About Barbara W. Tuchman

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) was a self-trained historian and author who achieved prominence with The Zimmerman Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. She received her BA degree from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo from 1934 to 1935. She then began working as a journalist and contributed to publications including The Nation, for which she covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent in 1937. Her other books, include The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, The First Salute, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45, also awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the US government’s highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

About Wanda McCaddon

Wanda McCaddon (d. 2023) narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, sometimes with the pseudonym Nadia May or Donada Peters. She earned the prestigious Audio Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lawyer on February 05, 2014

The Proud Tower: Barbara Tuchman's View of the World on the Road to War Channel Firing BY THOMAS HARDY That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened h......more

Goodreads review by Anthony on April 30, 2024

Neither Good Nor Bad. The world before the War. This book walks down the long trampled path in understanding what the world was like before the First World War. We often look through rose tinted glasses at what could have been, had disaster not struck in 1914. Where would society have taken us? What......more

Quotes

“Blackstone’s inspired pairing of narrator [Wanda McCaddon] with the work of Barbara Tuchman introduces a new generation to the pleasures of one of the twentieth century’s most popular and esteemed historians.”

“A stunning command of the storyteller’s arts of swift pacing, tense exposition, and colorful scene construction.”

“Mrs. Tuchman paints the scene for us with a masterly brush, a scene glittering and brilliant, sumptuous and outrageous.”

“A rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish…It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration.”

“An exquisitely written and thoroughly engrossing work…The author’s knowledge and skill are so impressive that they whet the appetite for more…An esthetically rewarding experience. No one should forgo the opportunity.”

“Mrs. Tuchman’s popularity is due to more than her skill with words…She never loses sight of individuals, and she is not afraid to tell a story…As in all her books, this one is resplendent with people.”

Awards

  • AudioFile Earphones Award
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