Tuchman dramatizes the diplomatic debacles that precipitated the war and the intransigence of the German and French armies as they dogmatically adhered to their battle plans, with disastrous consequences. Nowhere are her talents more brilliantly on display than in her Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller The Guns of August (1962), a riveting account of the outbreak of World War I and the weeks of fighting leading up to the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. A shrewd portraitist, she laid bare the all-too-human failures of leaders caught in the pull of historical currents and often tragically blinded by biases of culture and temperament. Tuchman distilled the complex interplay of personalities and events into gripping narratives that combine lucid scholarship with elegant literary art. One of the best-known historians of her time, Barbara W.
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