Barbara Tuchman is one of my favorite history writers. She gets a lot right in Guns but Chris Clar does a better job of explaining how Europe drifted into war in The Sleepwalkers. It wasn’t just that the royalty was all related to each other, but the mutual defense pacts engineered by Bismark caused a lot of “yeah, this’ll never happen’ clauses to kick in. It’s not clear that the war would have happened if Bismark was still alive.

I’ve read that Tuchman’s Guns was one of JFK’s favorite books, and that he’d reread it periodically. I do the same with her Distant Mirror and Stillwell.