Word: tuchman
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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...
...Tuchman is no newcomer to popular history. Her previous works have encompassed subjects from the Zimmerman telegram of World War I to the life of the French nobility in the middle ages, and her anecdotal style has captured the interest of enough of the general public to win her places on the New York Times bestseller list...
...count, Tuchman damns Popes from both ends of her pencil. She takes Alexander VI to task for granting an undeserved annulment to the French King, Louis XII, and thereby scandalizing the faithful. A few pages later she faults Clement VII for bowing to Habsburg political pressure and denying an annulment to Henry VIII of England...
...lessons Tuchman offers in The March of Folly, in short, may not be worth the drone of the lecture. Tuchman's enduring virtues have been the 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...
Only in the evenhanded section on the American Revolution does Tuchman display her great virtues at their best. That subject could have consumed a book. It should have been this one. -By Mayo Mohs