A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

Used. Hardcover. Barbara Tuchman brilliantly captures the fourteenth century, a remarkably wretched epoch defined by plague, endless warfare, and a church coming unglued. Through the glittering yet ruthless life of French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, she charts a continent desperately dancing on the edge of a medieval precipice while peasants foot the fatal bill. It is a sweeping, deeply researched historical narrative that proves human ambition somehow thrives even when the world is quite literally falling apart. Grab a copy and peer into this brilliantly dark distant mirror to see how remarkably little we have actually changed.