THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara...

THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara W. Tuchman (Ballantine: $14; 511 pp., illustrated). In her Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Tuchman delineates the personalities and events involved in the outbreak of World War I with the skill of a novelist. Thirty-two years after its initial publication, “The Guns of August” contains ominous echoes of the current crisis in the former Yugoslavia. The Great War erupted at a time when popular wisdom insisted that their economic interdependence made large-scale war impossible for the crumbling empires that had dominated the globe during the previous century, and Bismark predicted “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” would ignite the next war.