The seeds of this book were sown when, one warm summer afternoon at her home in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in 1986, I had a quiet, long, and thoughtful conversation with Barbara Tuchman.
A historian of what she called “the small facts, not the big Explanation,” she had twice won the Pulitzer Prize—and earned high praise for such books as A Distant Mirror, which used the fourteenth century and its Black Plague as a “mirror” for the twentieth century’s confusions and violence. As a columnist and staff writer for The Christian
Science Monitor, I was interviewing her for a series of articles based on the ideas of twenty-two leading thinkers around the world. Ultimately published as An Agenda for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 1987), this series sought
