Volume 25, Number 14 · September 28, 1978
The Worst of Times?
By Lawrence Stone
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
by Barbara W. Tuchman
Knopf, 678 pp., $15.95
Mrs. Tuchman has written four books about twentieth-century diplomatic and military history, and has won a Pulitzer Prize for two of them, which is a remarkable achievement. The criteria used for the award of these prizes would seem to be stylistic elegance, vivid descriptive narrative, accurate scholarship, a clear point of view, and a subject of current interest to a wide educated public. The winners of these prizes have been highly respected by the profession for all these qualitites, but they have not usually been regarded as path-breaking innovators in the field of history. Very few of them, for example, have received that final accolade of the profession, nomination as president of the American Historical Association. The impressive virtues and the limitations of Mrs. Tuchman's work seem fully to conform to this pattern.
Review, 3701 words
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