MY SAY: SPEAKING OF AUGUST
I have been home bound for most of this month and I was looking for a trashy novel, but instead found a gem.I am spellbound by one of the finest histories of World One by Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman (January 30, 1912- February 6, 1989).
In “The Guns of August” Tuchman documents the events that led up to World War 1; how it could have been stopped; and how it started. The bloody trench war resulted in a killing machine of four years. Who won? Humanity lost and Tuchman narrates the foiled and failed plans and the world events and strategies that led to the war.
In the first chapter, in flawless prose, Tuchman describes the funeral pomp, circumstance and procession of royals and gentry at the May 1910 funeral of Edward VII of the United Kingdom, nephew of the Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany who attended with eight other kings.
After detailing the military planning and alliances of the Germans, the French and joint strategies of France and England, and those of Russia, Tuchman segues into the events that triggered the conflict, namely, on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip a Serbian, assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria/Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Duchess of Hohenberg. On August 14th, 1914 -war started. It reads like a fast-paced movie.
As Tuchman has said:” Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books history is silent, literature blind, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”
One shudders to think how the state of teaching history in the academy has crumbled. rsk
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