Robert Wohl · World’s End
How good is Barbara Tuchman’s history? In one respect, the question is irrelevant because her readers have already answered it by purchasing hundreds of thousands of copies of her books. This fact alone might tempt the ‘serious’ student of history to dismiss her. But leaving aside her two Pulitzer prizes and her mountain of admiring reviews – many by distinguished and indisputably serious historians – Tuchman is not so easily dismissed. Broad in scope, ambitious in conception, carefully researched, her books make considerable demands on the reader, not the least of which is a willingness to pursue in minute detail topics as untrendy as the doctrinal disputes of pre-First World War socialists or the social and economic consequences of the Black Plague. That she has escalated her demands during the last twenty years while enlarging the circle of her readers suggests that she is a woman of distinctive talents.
Ideally, a consideration of Tuchman’s work would examine all seven of her books, which range from studies of British policy towards Spain and Palestine to her most recent, a daring (and, for me, surprisingly dull) reconstruction of European life in the 14th century.1 But the centrepiece of her achievement and the books on which her claims as a historian will have to rest are August 1914 (published originally in the United States in 1962 under the title of The Guns of August) and The Proud Tower (1966).
