The Proud Tower

Resumen del libro

"The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not 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 discover what moved the people in it."
--Barbara W. Tuchman
The fateful quarter-century leading up to the 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 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 the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their 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; the two Peace Conferences at the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized in the moment when the heroic Jean Jaurè s was shot to death on the night the War began and an epoch ended.

Biografía del autor

Barbara W. Tuchman (Nueva York, 1912-1989), periodista, escritora e historiadora, se licenció en el Radcliffe College. Empezó a destacar como historiadora con El telegrama Zimmermann (1959) y alcanzó la fama internacional con Los cañones de agosto (1962), que obtuvo un enorme éxito de ventas y ganó el Premio Pulitzer. Sus dos obras siguientes, La torre del orgullo (1966) y Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), alcanzaron una repercusión excepcional. Con este último además, volvió a ganar el Pulitzer. Entre sus trabajos ás reconocidos está también Un espejo lejano (1978).