Barbara W. Tuchman - The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman, as usual, breaks all the rules. She sails forth with bold moral purpose at a time when most other popular historians hug the shores of biography and most academic historians are content to paddle quietly in small ponds. Tuchmans special talent, as her fellow journalist and historian Frances Fitzgerald has written, lies in her ability to wade through mountains of documentation and come out with Ariadnes threadthe clean story line that permits her readers to follow her through a maze of events into the life of a period. There is more to Tuchmans appeal than superb storytelling. She also glories in unmasking deceit, cant, and pomposity.

Newsweek

The specter of this ultimate folly [nuclear war] hangs over Barbara Tuchmans brilliant and troubling book, The March of Folly, like a ghost from the future. She addresses it not a word. She doesnt have to. No one could read her accounts of the powerful of this world without thinking of the solemn warnings since 1945 that we are building weapons of our own destruction. For Tuchman this is the essence of folly: disaster plainly foreseen by many in good time, ready and feasible alternatives, willfully ignored by men obsessed with power.

Chicago Tribune

The March of Folly is, at one level, a glittering narrative of three major events. At another, it is a moral essay on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffered in consequence.

The New York Times Book Review

The specter of this ultimate folly [nuclear war] hangs over Barbara Tuchmans brilliant and troubling book, The March of Folly, like a ghost from the future. She addresses to it not a word. She doesnt have to. No one could read her accounts of the powerful of this worldcorrupt Renaissance popes, the arrogant ministers of King George III of Britain who lost America, the confident Cold War mandarins of Washington without thinking of the solemn warnings since 1945 that we are building the weapons of our own destruction. For Tuchman this is the essence of folly: disaster plainly foreseen by many in good time, ready and feasible alternatives, willfully ignored by men obsessed with power.

Chicago Tribune

The March of Folly is, at one level, a glittering narrative of three major events. At another, it is a moral essay on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.

The New York Times Book Review

Only one living writer of history has gained and held anything like such a general readership. Barbara Tuchmans new book shows us why. She now sweeps us through thirty centuries, from the fall of Troy to the war in Vietnam, paying close attention along the way to how the Renaissance popes provoked the Reformation and England lost the American coloniesthe four events shes found to propel her idea that the disasters of history are the result of the folly of rulers. But even these thumping good stories are not quite enough for her. We are also asked to think of Montezuma, of the Visigoths in Spain, of Louis XIV and the Huguenots, of the Kaisers use of submarine warfare, of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: folly upon absorbing folly.

Vogue

Like her past books, her new one is witty, intelligent and elegant. Tuchman without question is the most skilled popular historian in practice.

The New Milford Times

By Barbara W. Tuchman

BIBLE AND SWORD (1956)

THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM (1958)

THE GUNS OF AUGUST (1962)

THE PROUD TOWER (1966)

STIL WELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA (1971)

NOTES FROM CHINA (1972)

A DISTANT MIRROR (1978)

PRACTICING HISTORY (1981)

THE MARCH OF FOLLY (1984)

THE FIRST SALUTE (1988)

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1984 by Barbara W. Tuchman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to The University of
Chicago Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from
The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore. Copyright 1951 by
the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Used by permission.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-45672

eISBN: 978-0-307-79856-5

This edition by arrangement with
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

v3.1

And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends, or by madmen to nonsense and disaster.

J OSEPH C AMPBELL
Foreword to The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, 1969