The Impossibly High Standards Booklist
Discover the Impossibly High Standards Booklist—a curated selection of essential reads on history, business, and science. Featuring Barbara W. Tuchman's The Proud Tower, Daniel Yergin's The Prize, and Art and Physics, this list demands excellence for discerning minds seeking profound insight and intellectual rigor.
Book
The Proud Tower
by Barbara W. Tuchman
The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. The Proud Tower, The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era.
Book
The Prize
by Daniel Yergin
Chronicles the history of the oil industry and the forces that have shaped the modern world.
