Word: troys
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Well, don't try telling that to Harvard Coach Don Usher who, while not exactly cocky, thinks the netwomen can show something against the Women of Troy...
...WHAT DO TROY, Renaissance Rome, the English parliament of the eighteenth century and America in the 1960s have in common? Each had leaders who led their countries to disaster, and each is the subject of a chapter in historian Barbara W. Tuchman's new book The March of Folly...
...prototype of tales of political folly, Tuchman says, is the story of the Seige of Troy. Why would the Trojans suspect nothing when their enemies for 10 years, the Greeks, withdrew suddenly in the middle of the night and left a huge wooden horse behind them? The Trojans neglected even to examine the horse before tearing down the gates of their city to bring it inside...
Unlike her previous books, which tend to degenerate into a string of unrelated, if interesting, incidents, Tuchman binds the four examples together with common factors. Starting with the original Laocoon, a citizen of Troy who felt that various natural phenomena promised doom, Tuchman goes on to find modern-day Laocoons. John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and McGeorge Bundy. Moreover, each instance of folly described by Tuchman builds on the one before it: modern leaders repeat--and expand--the mistakes of their predecessors...
...clarity and grace of her elegant sentences, spinning out images of the past that took the reader to the scene. In this new enterprise she sometimes seems too much in a hurry to pause for that valuable indulgence. Her dense, rapid-fire synopsis of the siege and fall of Troy is, inexplicably, almost as wooden as the horse. Her enthusiastic expedition into papal territory (where she solemnly scolds, but obviously admires, the ferocious warrior-Pope Julius II) stops dead for impenetrable paragraphs dealing with Renaissance politics. The sharply polemical tone in the Viet Nam section undermines the intended message...