The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman

Abachus, 1990 - History - 559 pages

From the distinguished American historian whose work has been acclaimed around the world, a major new book that penetrates one of the most bizarre and fascinating paradoxes in history: the persistent pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own intersts. Across the march of thirty centuries, Tuchman brings to life the dramatic events which constitute folly's hallmark in government; the fall of Troy, symbolic prototype of freely chosen disaster; the Protestant secession, provoked by six decades of spectacularly corrupt papcy; the British forfeiture of the American colonies; and America's catastrophic thirty year involvement with vietnam.

What people are saying

Review: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

User Review  - Michael Kotsarinis - Goodreads

The book demonstrates all the apparent and painful truth that nothing dazzles people more than power and turns them into blind fools when they actually hold it.

Review: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

User Review  - Lisa Houlihan - Goodreads

Two things distracted me from the author's point: One, I read it 30 years on and the early '80s mindset felt alien and distant. Two, the narrator's pronunciation. The VattieCAN. Marry-land. "Congress ...

About the author

Barbara Tuchman is a double Pulizter Prize winning historian who has writen some of the seminal popular historical works of our age. She died in 1989.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
• Author: Barbara Wertheim Tuchman
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Abachus, 1990
• ISBN: 0349106746, 9780349106748
• Length: 559 pages