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The introduction is a "must read" for anyone seriously interested in history. She explains how writing history should be from a certain amount of hindsight. I may add to this review later, and just raised my rating from three to four stores based on my own hindsight view of the book. ( )

Tuchman was an amazing historian and narrative writer. Her books on the First World War alone are classics. In some of her early chapters here, on history as a process and discipline, she shines. She adds some wonderful articles from her career that shine. "Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead" is a classic of narrative history. (And the inspiration for the great, but historically mangled movie The Wind and the Lion.) However, her FDR-style liberalism, bordering on an extreme naïveté towards Soviet and Maoist communism. She trashes the Vietnam project under LBJ, but then twice as much vitriol toward Nixon. Several article/chapters excoriate Nixon for Watergate, leading to her suggestion for a executive panel of presidents. Her one counterfactual, what-if, history outing here, "If Mao Had Come to Washington," assumes Mao was a normal fellow you could do business with, undermined by dumb Americans who unflinchingly and ignorantly hate socialism/communism. It undermines her, and she betrays her own admonition to make historical hypotheses, when t he history should speak for itself. Like a good twentieth-century liberal, she totally misconstrues (p. 265) the Second Amendment and skips over the whole part about it being a "right of the people." But, I digress.... The first section of the book, "Craft," should be assigned to history students in grad school as a counterweight to the postmodernist/lit-crit ideas that unfortunately permeate the academy. The chapter on biography as history, especially, as credentialed historians often anathematize biography as "not really history" and leave it to popularizers who are often journalists. ( )

I read Tuchman’s books in high school and had vague memories of them. She’s really into telling coherent stories, but mostly what I got from this essay collection was: wow, she was pretty racist. I especially liked how the Japanese (“Orientals”) were congenitally incapable of negotiating fairly because they refused to accept facts, whereas Israelis were so successful because they refused to accept facts. ( )