{"product_id":"2026200015549-secondhand-august-1914","title":"August 1914","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: No dust jacket\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003cbr\u003eCondition remarks: Minor staining to fore-edge.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the sweltering summer of 1914, the great powers of Europe stumbled — with catastrophic certainty — into the most devastating war the world had ever seen. Barbara Tuchman's August 1914 (also published as The Guns of August) is a masterful work of narrative history that chronicles the opening weeks of World War One, tracing the fatal miscalculations, rigid military timetables, and catastrophic political failures that transformed a regional assassination into a global conflagration. With the precision of a scholar and the pace of a thriller, Tuchman reconstructs the decisions of emperors, generals, and diplomats whose hubris and blind adherence to pre-set war plans sealed the fate of millions.\n\nTuchman's signature style — authoritative, vivid, and richly detailed — transforms archival history into a gripping human drama, drawing on diaries, dispatches, and eyewitness accounts to bring the fog of war to life. A Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, this work stands as one of the defining texts of 20th-century military historiography, arguing with devastating clarity that the catastrophe of the Great War was not inevitable, but was instead the product of human pride and institutional inertia. For anyone seeking to understand how civilisation can march, eyes wide open, into the abyss, this remains an essential and profoundly unsettling read.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203208388827,"sku":"2026200015549-SECONDHAND","price":12.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/89625e7d-f4b0-45e3-9fd5-137ae154d3c9.png?v=1788145761","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200015549-secondhand-august-1914","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}