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The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
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The Guns of August

$20.99

Retail price: $31.95

Discount: 34%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Wanda McCaddon
Length 19 hours 9 minutes
Language English
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In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I.

This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and how horrible it became.

Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the turning point in the year 1914, the month leading up to the war, and the first month of the war. With fine attention to detail, she reveals how and why the war started and why it could have been stopped but wasn't, managing to make the story utterly suspenseful even when we already know the outcome.

A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten.

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) was a self-trained historian and author who achieved prominence with The Zimmerman Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. She received her BA degree from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo from 1934 to 1935. She then began working as a journalist and contributed to publications including The Nation, for which she covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent in 1937. Her other books, include The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, The First Salute, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45, also awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the US government’s highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

Wanda McCaddon began recording books for the fledgling audiobook industry in the early 1980s and has since narrated well over six hundred titles for major audio publishers, as well as abridging, narrating, and coproducing classic titles for her own company, Big Ben. Audiobook listeners may be familiar with her voice under one of her two "nom de mikes," Donada Peters and Nadia May. The recipient of an Audie Award and more than twenty-five Earphones Awards, AudioFile magazine has named her one of recording's Golden Voices. Wanda also appears regularly on the professional stage in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Reviews

“An epic never flagging in suspense.”

“Fascinating…One of the finest works of history written…A splendid and glittering performance.”

“I have been unable to put this book down…Barbara W. Tuchman writes brilliantly and inspiringly...The Guns of August is lucid, fair, critical, and witty.”

“In provoking musing thoughts, Tuchman has no contemporary equal. Her book, thus, has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.”

“More dramatic than fiction...Magnificent…Beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced...The product of painstaking and sophisticated research.”

“Brilliant…Her narrative grips the mind.”

“Narrator [Wanda McCaddon] sounds exactly as listeners would expect historian Barbara Tuchman to sound:  educated, knowledgeable and fascinated with her subject —like the best kind of history professor—and her British accent lends more authority.”

“Tuchman’s masterpiece of historical reconstruction has been given a narrator who comprehends in full its enormous narrative power…While Tuchman’s large cast of armies and their generals is challenging, [McCaddon] lessens this difficulty with her mimicry of national accents, as well as her pacing and variations in tone. [An] unforgettable listening experience…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

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