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The Guns of August

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The Guns of August

Auteur(s): Barbara W. Tuchman
Narrateur(s): Wanda McCaddon
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À propos de cet audio

 In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of Kings and Kaisers and Czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed...and how horrible it became.

Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from 19th to 20th Century, focusing on the turning point in the year 1914: the month leading up to the war and the first month of the war. With fine attention to detail, she reveals how and why the war started, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't, managing to make the story utterly suspenseful even when we already know the outcome.

©1990 Dr. Lester Tuchman (P)2005 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Guerres et conflits Militaire Moderne Monde XXe siècle Guerre Redevances Impérialisme Russie Moyen Âge Japon impérial L’entre-deux-guerres

Ce que les critiques en disent

"More dramatic than fiction...a magnificent narrative - beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced...The product of painstaking and sophisticated research." (Chicago Tribune)
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It is a good book. I can't say I liked it though...rather made me sad. Nothing has changed since unfortunately.

Accurate window into past events

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This is a great book about a pivotal moment in history. However, if like me, you usually listen to audiobooks while doing other things, this book can be difficult to follow. Frequently, I had to back up to listen to a part to understand what was happening, sometimes multiple times. This might be a book that's better off being read rather than listened to.

Great book, might be better in physical version

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…from the astonishing set piece describing the funeral of Edward the VII in 1910, the last gasp of European monarchy, to the collapsing house of cards that led to the horrors of WWI.

I read (for the second time, after many years) Guns of August in preparation for reading Maragaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 (The Peacemakers), the account of the peace process at the end of World War I, which created the conditions for the Second World War, and helped to shape the world of today.
Tuchman tracks the decisions (and equivocations and indecisions, the surrender to inevitability or military necessity) made by politicians and generals, and examines their characters, and failures of character, in brilliant, brief portraits. The story is a litany of failures: failures of vision, failures of decision making, of politics and diplomacy, failures of will, failures of conscience.

She does not examine what happened to Austria Hungary and Serbia after the first few hours that started the war, but this is on purpose. Tuchman’s project is to understand why a local dispute between these two countries led Germany to invade Belgium and France, and what happened immediately after, focusing mostly on the conflict in western Europe.

Tuchman describes Germany’s explicit acts of terror against civilians in Belgium and France as a conscious policy of control. France’s suicidal offensive military philosophy of elan. Britain’s indecisivenss on entering (and staying in) the war (which continues to today - see Ferguson’s The Pity of War). Russian leadership’s vast corruption and ineptitude (which also continues to today). Many of the main characters do not come off well. The German Kaiser, his capricious arrogance and selfishness. Joffre’s implacable certainty. John French’s collapse of will in the fog of war.
I have read some of the criticisms of this book by modern historians, but the overall arc is still valid and certainly well told.

For all of their willingness, even eagerness, to go to war, the generals and politicians were woefully unprepared for the consequences, and did not understand how war had fundamentally changed in a world of industrial scale technologies.

Modern military historians argue that by the Somme (1916) the military combatants had (finally) learned what heavy artillery and machine guns could do, and had developed improved (but still horrifically wasteful) tactics, but Tuchman looks at the first months of the war when generals in their chateaux continued to order reckless mass charges (the French, in their bright coloured uniforms) against entrenched defensive positions leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary casualties in a few weeks.

Such a terrible waste of life, of value, of potential, for the sake of imperial honour and ambition.
I plan to read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers to get an updated perspective on the same material, but I would still recommend Guns of August.

A master class in narrative history

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Great story, very well written. Hopefully, we will remember because we are heading the same way right now. The narration was very lively, with accent and everything.

Can't believe this happens only 100 years ago!

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Brilliant observational synopsis of a conflagration of various geopolitical conditions that provide a salient cautionary tale for the present.

Guns of August

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