The Guns of August cover art

The Guns of August

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

The Guns of August

By: Barbara W. Tuchman
Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £19.19

Buy Now for £19.19

About this listen

 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 19th to 20th 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.

©1990 Dr. Lester Tuchman (P)2005 Blackstone Audio, Inc. 20th Century Military Modern World War Imperialism Royalty Russia Middle Ages Imperial Japan Interwar Period

Critic reviews

"More dramatic than fiction...a magnificent narrative - beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced...The product of painstaking and sophisticated research." (Chicago Tribune)
All stars
Most relevant
loved this. great characterisations. beautifully read with the right amount of panache and gravity as required

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Well written and narrated of the prelude to and first stages of the First World War.

Excellent historical analysis

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Tuchman’s magisterial accounting of the beginnings of the First World War, while not an exhaustive scholarly study, is brilliant and compelling, at times absurd and hilarious and at others deadly serious. The myriad faults of mankind are laid out in the comedy of errors that was the Schlieffen Plan and the ill-conceived Plan XVIi- all masterfully narrated by Wanda McCaddon, whose voice is so pleasing that I have relistened to this work four times and I still adore it. Cannot recommend highly enough.

Narrative History At Its Finest

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
War is no my favourite subject. But this is a description of the first month of WWI that is something out of the ordinary, With interesting portraits of the main players in Germany, Belgium, Russia, France and England and with a comprehensive, if not sometimes a bit too detailed, description of all the events leading up to the battle of Marne.
It leaves me with a deep feeling of sorrow for the meaningless of war and that the lifes of millions can be in the hands of so mediocre or even useless military commanders.

A very well written history of war

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A page turning book with lots of interesting facts and actually some humor. Everybody should read it.

An amazing book about a terrible war.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews