A Distant Mirror - Softcover

Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim

4.05

41,156 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345289307 ISBN 13: 9780345289308

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1979

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The author looks into the history of Western Europe between 1300 and 1450, drawing parallels with the 20th century and looks into Chaucer, Boccaccio, The Hundred Years' War, pilgrimages, plagues and revolts against a poll tax, amongst other things. Tuchman has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "August 1914" and "Sand Against Wind" and her other novels are "The Proud Tower", "The Zimmermann Telegram" and "Bible and Sword".

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Review:

A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer (Wall Street Journal)

Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition (Commentary)

Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better (New York Review of Books)

From the Back Cover:

'Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . No one has ever done this better' New York Review of Books

It has been said that 'no epoch was more naturally mad'. On the one hand the fourteenth century was a time of fabled crusades and chivalry, of glittering cathedrals and princely splendour; on the other, it was an age of social chaos and spiritual agony, pocked by plague.

Here, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman captures both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of daily life - what childhood and marriage were like; how money, taxes and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike; how death came for all, even the most skilful of knights.

Granting her subjects their beauties, treacheries and guilty passions, Tuchman synthesizes the lives of proud cardinals, riotous students, feminists, innkeepers, saints and mercenaries over a vast canvas. The result is an astonishing reflection of medieval Europe, a historical tour de force and, without doubt, her finest achievement.

'A beautiful, extraordinary book' Wall Street Journal

'Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition' Commentary

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