As a preface to this review, I wanted to say that the pace at which I read a book ultimately affects my reactions. A quick pace tends to accentuate the experience. Read a bad book quickly, and the annoying quirks become sort of overwhelming. Read a good book quickly and the prose and pieces fit together even better. That said, I read this book at a pretty sluggish pace (until the final five chapters) so I feel that my reactions are ultimately a bit dulled.

A couple strong reactions persist nontheless.

Some reviewers have said this reads better than fiction. I disagree. Sure it's not a dry PhD thesis that belongs in some university attic. But the detail got a little too dense for my liking. I'm no military history buff, so the discussions on exposed flanks and troop movements seemed stretched out for me. The larger points (the cult of the offensive, Russia's intel mistakes, British inaction, Belgian resistance) are more valuable and compelling than some of the book's finer details. (It also didn't help that I couldn't figure out how to get my Kindle to zoom in on Tuchman's maps.)

Still, the last few chapters are gold. The frantic scramble to save France (and Europe?) from German victory kept me enthralled.


Tuchman's admitted subjectivity also jumped out at me. Sure, all history is subjective but Tuchman's subjectivity seemed dated in historical stereotypes: the punctual, but cruel Germans. The free-wheeling French. The perpetually drunk Russians. And she picks her heros and bad guys, and paints them pretty strongly. Such and such was a priggish idiot. Such and such made the most crucial mistake of the war. But I guess that's part of what makes this book so compelling: the characters really jump out at you even though at times they seem better suited for box-office action films.

Still I can't deny that Tuchman did an incredible job researching this book. And for me, Tuchman's Afterword on the job of the historian sweeps away concerns about her overly-bold descriptions: "[The historian:] discovers that truth is subjective and separate, made up of little bits seen, experienced, and recorded by different people. It is like a design seen through a kaleidosope; when the cylinder is shaken the countless colored fragment form a new picture. Yet they are the same fragments that made a different picture a moment earlier." For me, these sentences gave even more weight to her writing.


Lastly the Cold War thesis that made this book especially powerful when first published was tough for me to find. Published in the year of the Bay of Pigs, this book is supposed to do more than rehash the first month of World War I. According to Tuchman's not-so-humble Preface, the book's underlying thesis argues that the events of August 1914 ultimately set the course for the 20th century and the great ideological battle between the US and Russia. Or at least that's what it's supposed to do.

Maybe because I'm a young'n born just before the Wall came down, but I had trouble finding this underlying Cold War thesis. Sure, Tuchman shows that August 1914 changed the world forever. That a war that began for really no good reason at all (just from an unstable multi-polar world) would leave Europe drained and poor, and set the stage for World War 2. But even though Tuchman was writing at the height of Cold War tension, I didn't get that impression from the book.

Nontheless the book is highly relevant (not to mention entertaining) today. There's a certain romanticism found in Tuchman's last chapters that still rings true. Although WWI was a senseless war, to many it was the war to end all wars. There was a feeling that in July 1914 the world was on the brink of some titanic shift. And there was an optimism that if German imperialism could be stopped, some type of stable, happy, trade-focused world order could emerge. Maybe it was a naive hope (and one that ultimately led to horrifying disillusionment), but it's a naivity that still has a lot of power today. And this is a point I appreciated it.

So, yes this is an entertaining piece of history. At times it seemed to lean heavily on box-office type characters but maybe that's what differentiates it from drier texts. Ultimately, Tuchman commandingly gives relevance and entertainment to one of the defining months of the past century. It's a pretty good kaleidoscope.