Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World - Hardcover

Mee, Charles L.

3.7

44 ratings by Goodreads

9780671678883: Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671678884 ISBN 13: 9780671678883

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1993

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Recounts pivotal moments of diplomacy in which encounters between great leaders changed the future of the world

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Thoughtful variations on the theme that historic blunders can be traced as often as not to the booby traps that await even well- prepared leaders who engage in summitry. Drawing freely, if selectively, on a wealth of sources, Mee (Rembrandt's Portrait, 1988, etc.) offers seven sharply focused essays on turning-point parleys whose eventual outcomes illustrate pitfalls faced by great men bent on reshaping their worlds. He begins with a necessarily speculative account of the A.D. 452 meeting between Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun, neither of whom had accurate information about the other's position or aspirations. Mee moves on to delusions of grandeur, as exemplified by the unavailing means employed by Henry VIII to daunt his French counterpart--and vice versa--at a 1520 confrontation in Val d'Or. About the same time, albeit half a world away, Cort‚s and Montezuma learned (at the cost of an ancient culture) about the stunning impact of chance. Advancing by three centuries, Mee documents the principle of contingency, which (though understood) was ignored at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, with the result that Prussia became a dominating threat to Europe's balance of power in the post- Napoleonic era. To make his point about history's false lessons, the author fixes on the 1919 Paris gathering that produced the Treaty of Versailles, ``peace with a vengeance,'' which ended one global conflict and set the stage for another. Covered as well are the unexpected results of Yalta (e.g., the nuclear-arms race and the cold war), plus the reality check given Gorbachev during his 1991 attempt to thrust a collapsing USSR into the clubby circle of the so-called ``G7'' nations. Diverting and informative takes that confirm the suspicion that Western civilization's march through time has been a tragicomedy of errors and ironies. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Mee, who has written books about Meeting at Potsdam and The End of Order: Versailles 1919 , clearly has a taste for those moments in history when world leaders grab at the brass ring of history. Here he selects seven such pivotal encounters and constructs lively scenarios rich in data. In insightful extended essays, he analyzes Attila the Hun's confrontation with Pope Leo in 452; Cortes and Moctezuma at Tenochtitlan in 1519; the meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; the Congress of Vienna in 1815; the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; Yalta, 1945; and the G7 summit in London in 1991. Mee shows these meetings of "great" men to be as much about human complexities as diplomatic, a mix of hubris and compromise, blunders and wily statecraft, good intentions and broken trust. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.