Word: tuchman
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NONFICTION: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman ∙ American Caesar, William Manchester Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ∙ The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn ∙ The Illusion of Technique, William Barrett ∙ The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
...Hundred Years' War. It lasted from 1337 well into the 15th century, mainly because knights in armor could lay waste to a countryside, but, lacking siege cannon, could not usually capture a strongly defended walled town. There was a more fundamental reason for perpetual war, however. As Tuchman says of the English, "Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation." Fighting was supposed to be conducted according to the chivalric code, but actually it was a business, entered into for the purposes of seizing loot, capturing prisoners...
...Tuchman sees it, the noblemen of the time, including most of the rulers, were petulant adolescents. The French, who lost to England at Crecy in 1346, and at Poitiers ten years later, did so because they refused obstinately to understand that archers, who were not noble, could be effective soldiers. They still had not learned their lesson by the time of Agincourt...
...Turks. Coucy was the best of his kind, an able diplomat, a shrewd military leader and a man of good luck. His campaigns took him to England (where he married King Edward's daughter), Tunisia, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary. He died at century's end, appropriately for Tuchman. His only drawback as a subject is that almost nothing personal is known about him. As Tuchman notes with exasperation, the only contemporary sketch of Coucy shows him facing away from the artist...
Historian and author, Tuchman won Pulitzers for The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China...