Barbara Tuchmanâ??s The Guns of August appeared to glowing reviews in the popular press in February 1962. Orville Prescott, writing in the New York Times on February 5, declares it â??a splendid and glittering performance, one of the finest works of history written in recent yearsâ?; she writes â??elegant and polishedâ? prose that reflects â??a sardonic sense of humor.â? And Tuchman, Prescott continues, concentrates â??on what people said, did and felt. Her pages are full of apt quotations and of hundreds of dramatic scenes and episodes.â? The work, he concludes, â??is a fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.â?
The reading public agreed with Prescott. The book stayed on the bestseller list for more than forty weeks. In 1963 it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. President John Kennedy reportedly read The Guns of August before the Cuban missile crisis later in 1962. It was said that he found in Tuchmanâ??s admonitions to be skeptical about military plans the reasons behind his own sharp questioning of the military plans offered to him that Octoberâ??plans that turned out to be exceptionally suspect. And, in the years since, the work has been assigned to generations of students on courses that deal with the First World War and with questions of grand strategy.
Read Full Article »