"A rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish.
It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration."
New York Times

"Tuchman proved in The Guns of August that she could write better military history
than most men. In this sequel, she tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding."
Time

"A stunning command of the storyteller's arts of swift pacing, tense exposition, and colorful
scene construction."Newsweek

The fateful quarter century leading up to 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 to
that point in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.

Barbara Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading
up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy; the anarchists of Europe and America; Germany
and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev's Russian Ballet and Stravinsky's music; the
Dreyfus Affair; two peace conferences in The Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm,
and tragedy of socialism, epitomized by the death of heroic Jean Jaurs on the night the war began
and an epoch ended.

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989), American historian, was born in New York City and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1933. She won the Pulitzer Prize for history twice, for The Guns of August (1962), and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971).

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.