The Guns of August

Overwritten in the best possible way.

Not sure if this author is expressing their opinion of the leaders of the various countries, her resources or both; I came away thankful I didn't have to be around people that think that much of themselves.

I thought the author did an admirable job of helping the reader keep up with the change of location as she moved down the timeline and most important to me, she answered the question I'd always had about why 1 assassination that didn't occur in one of the major countries, brought them all to war.

I made the mistake of listening to this as an audiobook. Without maps to refer to or a detailed knowledge of French, German, and Belgian geography, I was lost for most of the book. It would have been easier to follow all the people and place names if I was visually reading them, too.

I don't really care for military stuff, but this was very good and interesting. I feel like I need to read this at least once more to understand it all.

Amazing.
Reading this book was for me an extraordinary experience. I felt as if Tuchman was sitting next to me, preemptively explaining further when I was about to ask a question, or summing up if I seemed to get less interested. Every time I was wished she had included some detail, there it was. And every time I felt that a topic has had enough coverage, it was the topic's last paragraph.

The writing style is simply perfect. Paragraphs follow each other in perfect and systematic logical order. Inside, the paragraphs are uniformly and elegantly structured with a topic sentence first, followed by details and examples, and summery. This pleasant invariability of format makes Tuchman extremely easy to follow. It also prevents the reader from getting lost in a long technical descriptions, such as movements of armies in battle. Compared with Tuchman's technical descriptions, other sources seemed written desultorily.

The methodical and systematic writing style and coverage of topics, combined with Tuchman's bewildering ability to accurately present all the information relevant, and yet avoid any redundancies or uninteresting excrescences make this book a wonderful masterpiece.