Fascinating history

This is a compelling cultural and political portrait of the world prior to World War I. The author's method is to focus closely on personalities and movements around the world. The treatment of Germany via Richard Strauss is fascinating. Her portrait of the anarchists shows surprising parallels with today's terrorists, and you can be sure it is not anachronistic, because this book was published in the early 1960s. There is much more.

Nadia May is a superb narrator for long complex non-fiction works such as this. I marvel at her ability to intelligently sustain drive and interest with this type of text.

61 persone l'hanno trovata utile

All-Encompassing View of the Period

This book was truly a complete picture of life leading up to the First World War. British politics, the Spanish-American War, the French Dreyfus Affair, German composers, peace conferences, socialists, and anarchists are all covered in excruciating detail, along with several other topics. I knew very little about the period before I started listening and now I feel like I really understand what life was like in that period. To really understand the First World War, you need to understand more than just the Triple Entente/Triple Alliance and the Serbian terrorist attack of 1914. The tension, the romantic attitude towards war, and the arms race all contributed as well, along with many other factors.

The world really was culturally foreign in that time compared to the rest of the 20th century, so understanding it takes covering a wide variety of parts of life in that time period to properly get the feeling of it. This book covers everything you might want to know (and more) and gives a clear picture of what factors created the powder keg that existed in 1914. It sticks with one topic for a section, even if that means referencing events that haven't been explained yet. Don't worry if you hear a reference to something and are frustrated by the lack of explanation - she gets to them later and as the book goes on it fits together better and better.

The narration in this book is perhaps the best I've ever encountered. Nadia May is the only narrator I've ever heard do a huge variety of accents without sounding like she's mocking them (her only weakness is American accents - she is British and her American accents sound mostly British with some American phonemes to my ears). I teach French and her pronunciation in that language is impeccable - I find it very annoying if it is done poorly, and this is the first one I've listened to with French terms where I haven't found the pronunciation lacking. I know very little German, but her German sounds just as high-quality as far as I can tell.

The reason I gave this book four stars instead of five (and I would have liked to do 4.5) was because of the lack of explanation for foreign-language statements at times and for the extent of background knowledge required on the variety of democratic systems existing at the time. While I understand French perfectly, I did notice a lack of translation for some longer phrases and once it reached the section with German, which I only understand in terms of phrasebook-level phrases, it was frustrating to not get the full picture sometimes. Being Canadian, I understand the British system (ours is based on theirs) and the American system and am familiar with the French and German ones to an extent from teaching political science. But it would be confusing if you had no real understanding of those systems, especially the British one, which was talked about in detail but never explained. In fact, none of them were explained, just referenced.

The other small issue was that the sections on British politics were so full of a huge number of characters that they were hard to follow, even when you understand their political system. Dozens of ministers, opposition leaders, union leaders, lords, aristocrats, and influential figures come and go and it requires some concentration to keep track of who's who. I listen to audiobooks in the car, and splitting up the British sections meant that it always took me a minute to remember which party Lord Salisbury belonged to and what the heck he'd been doing when I paused it that morning.

In general, one of the most enlightening and educational works of non-fiction I've ever read.

25 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Liked the book, liked the narrator

I, too, started with "A Distant Mirror," which I've read in print twice (20 years apart), and I've always liked Tuchman's ability to use a few singular characters to illustrate the broad strokes of an era. Having listened to several Henry James, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, et al, novels recently, I realized I didn't really have a comprehensive view of late 19th century/pre-WWI political and social history, and I was pleased to find Tuchman had written about the era. Like Simon Winchester, she uses gem-quality details to bring both place and time to life.

I enjoyed the narration very much, but this is clearly a very subjective matter. I have listened to several books (coincidentally) narrated by May, and I really like her tone, her accent(s), her voicings, and her pace. I learned early on in my Audible membership to listen to a sample before downloading, and I am still grateful for classics that offer several narrator options.

23 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Tuchman's great, but this book isn't for beginners

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Great book if you already have some basic knowledge of the era. Terrible book if you don't already know a basic outline of Europe of the era.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Proud Tower?

Hardly a 'moment' - but the (long) description of the changes in music and theater were particularly informative and new information.

Have you listened to any of Nadia May’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Handled different accents, persons, voices, exceptionally well.

12 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Remarkable Achievement

Tuchman's Proud Tower is both history and literary work of art. Her focus on the the high tide of the 2nd industrial revolution, the cult of progress, the rise of mass politics and the invention of the modern city, suggest an ambition closer to Gibbon recalling his beloved Romans than a world that is only a century past. And in a moral sense, this is the point of her work, the historical rupture of WW1 and all that it swept away. Tuchman's account of the Dreyfus Affair, Speaker of the House Thomas Reed's showdown with Congress and the death of Jaures are like perfect miniatures from Plutarch, each of them models and warnings about the end of a civilization.

11 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Tuchman sweep marred by narrator.

This book, like all of Tuchman's popular histories, is sweeping, interesting for general readers, and easy to understand without being pedantic or shallow. What I've always liked about Tuchman -- her knack for analyzing the root causes of events without losing the colour and passion of individual lives -- is evident here, though somewhat less technically-adept than her brillian medieval history 'A Distant Mirror'.

However, this particular Audible.com edition is marred by the precious upper-class accent of the narrator. Listening to Tuchman's descriptions of English aristocratic privelege in the tones of a girl's private school matron is slightly annoying, but as this lengthy book progresses through chapters on American politics, popular culture and social mores, and the coming Great War, it becomes positively off-putting. I particularly dislike the narrator's tendency to put on goofy foreign accents when reading quotations by the characters Tuchman discusses (GB Shaw in drole Irish brogue, Petr Kropotkin in absurd Russian growl, and so on).

This book is a great value at the price, but sample the reader's voice before you buy.

10 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Don't buy this! Faulty media!

What disappointed you about The Proud Tower?

This is an excellent and important book, but there is no indexing on the file. It is one single file with no chapter breaks, so if you loose your place in the 20 odd hours, you have no way of finding your place. This is the third Audible.com book that has arrived in defective condition. The others were just very poorly recorded. Although this is the fault of the producer and not Audible.com, the latter should screen their products more carefully.

9 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Lively history, beautifully read

This book is worth buying for chapter one alone. This paints a word picture of the lives of the aristocratic rulers of Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century, at the peak of Victorian imperial power. It is sympathetic in tone, full of individual anecdote, and at times very funny.

Much of the book is just as good, with a close look at US politics at the time, the conditions and ideas that gave rise to the anarchists and international socialists, and the madness that engulfed French politics during the Dreyfus affair. The realistic cynicism in the description of the Hague peace conferences is brilliantly done and gives a strong sense of why the era eventually collapsed into the horror and violence of the Great War. The German chapter and the story of the tangled politics of the 'welfare' parliament are rather slower, but worth the listen.

8 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Ruling class violence is cool. Anarchism is silly

Tuchman goes into all kinds of loving detail about the curiosities and playful habits of the ruling class. She ignores all violence they perpetrate in favor of stories about their dietary habits and fondness for gambling and hunting and riding. She speaks reverently of their intellect, affectionately of their handsome faces. The anarchists, however, are "violent" and "cruel" and don't understand what "human nature" really is. Their revolutionaries are "misguided" or "fooled" and are hopelessly "utopian". Her absolute infatuation with a ruling class that exists on a mountain of skulls of imperialist war can be seen as somewhat fussy or particular, but quaint and respectable. People fighting against their rule, silly and confused.

I don't ask that she take the side of the anarchists. I would be fine with a simple history of their views and actions, but whereas she doesn't editorialize anything to do with the bourgeois classes, simply reports on their lifestyle and behaviors, she cannot help but insert her thoughts on anarchism at every turn. If you're going to insert your view of anarchism as "utopian" and against "human nature" maybe insert the literal river of blood that keeps the imperialist bourgeois classes in their carriages and frocks too.

7 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Masterful

As always with Barbara Tuchman a masterful, enlightening and instructive view on the selected period. In this case you get the feeling of living through the pre-war period. Some chapters are just an absolute please (e.g. first one on the English goverment & establishment, chapter on the Dreyfus affair in France). It is also commendable how taking ~8-9 different subjects and sticking to them the author manages to create a coherent tapestry of the period

7 persone l'hanno trovata utile