Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

No Vive in Le France

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman

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Barbara Tuchman is most noted for The Guns of August, her excellent take on World War I. While that book deserves the flowers it gets, this one should probably garner more just based on its ambition and scope. Tuchman is trying to capture what western Europe — specifically France — was like in the 14th century. The entirety of the 14th century. From dirt poor peasants to games of thrones amongst kings, nobles and popes, Tuchman’s view is broad and finished. I can’t think of any […]

Margery Allingham (1); Barbara Tuchman (1); Barry Goldwater (1); Katherine Dunn (1); William Wells Brown (1); Elaine Marie Alphin (1); Julian Barnes (1)

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham

Notes from China by Barbara Tuchman

Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

On Cussing by Katherine Dunn

Narrative of William W Brown, A Fugitive Slave by William W Brown

An Unspeakable Crime by Elaine Marie Alphin

The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes

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The Case of the Late Pig “The main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is to not let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story.” This middle of the road mystery by Margery Allingham (I mean middle of the road in the sense that she is eight books into the series with this particular detective and about 10 books into her career) from 1937 begins with our narrator, the detective (erm criminologist) Albert Campion. He is called out into the […]

The Guns of August – Barbara Tuchman (1962)

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

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As Barbara Tuchman tells us in the intro, this book spawned from two previous books of hers: Bible and Sword (which I haven’t read) and The Zimmerman Telegram (which I have). She previously only wanted to focus on an even narrower focus, but her publisher, who essentially commissioned the book, really wanted a book about the battle of Mons. She decided that focusing on the various maneuvers in the two decades previous to the war, and then on the first month, August of 1914, she […]

The Zimmerman Telegram – Barbara Tuchman (1958)

The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara Tuchman

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Because this is a narrative history (as are pretty much all of Tuchman’s) part of the job of the review, as I see it, is to separate the history itself from the telling of that history. Here, Tuchman gives a much more detailed accounting of the Zimmerman Telegram (Note), which for most American, exists as either a figurative footnote or a literal blurb in their high school American history classes. So the story here mostly revolves around a few key themes: cryptography — what is […]

History began to exert it fascination upon me when I was about six, through the medium of the Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins.

Praticing History by Barbara Tuchman

A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

Deadlock by Sara Paretsky

The Sweet Science by AJ Liebling

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

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Practicing History – 4/5 Stars This is a collection of essays, mostly about history writing, by the American historian Barbara Tuchman. This is my third Tuchman book, and the least “history” one. Her other two books, The First Salute and March to Folly, were both history driven, but also argument driven. This book’s essays cover a wide ranging set of essays, some specifically focused on historical questions like Mao and figures connected to WWI, while the bulk (or at least it feels this way) were mostly about the […]

And I Saw a Pale Horse

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman

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This is an expansive look especially at France in the 14th century, but in lesser detail also at England and the rest of Europe. Tuchman examines all aspects of medieval life, be it customs, romance, chivalry, or the living conditions of the poorest and the richest, simply everything one could ever want to know about this particular period in history, which was an absurdly terrible time indeed. In the 14th century, the first harbingers of the Little Ice Age caused periods of famine, the Hundred […]



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