Clausewitz insisted on aggressively following up after concentrating force at the decisive point. Any strategy that doesn’t account for how to exploit victory is incomplete, inadequate. “What remains true under all imaginable conditions,” he wrote, “is that no victory will be effective without pursuit; and no matter how brief the exploitation of victory, it must always go further than an immediate follow-up.

A few pages later Eiseley describes a dinner with W. H. Auden, an admirer of his work. The dinner goes badly. By his own admission, he has been feeling uncomfortable with the great poet, diminished somehow in his presence. Auden, aware of the stiffness between them, is chatting to set them at ease. He asks Eiseley, who is exactly his age, to name the earliest public event he remembers, and mentions, briefly, that in his case it was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Eiseley replies by falling into an extended reverie over a prison break (also in 1912) that took place near his home, letting his voice go self-consciously “poetic” as he speaks (“He blew the gates with nitroglycerin. I was five years old … already old enough to know one should flee from the universe but I did not know where to run … There was an armed posse and a death … We never made it”). The tale is long, self-dramatizing, and unmistakably competitive. Yet we are touched, not embarrassed, by it because we’ve already been given a taste of the rawness inside the man.

To a considerable degree, the entire book is an ever-deepening clarification of these two passages, each in its own way harrowing: the one a transparent denial of pain everlasting, the other of a longing akin to the pain that dare not be addressed openly. Chapter headings may read “The Rat That Danced,” or “Toads and Men,” or “The Coming of the Giant Wasps,” but we are engaged by the man who told us more than he meant to tell himself when he rapped out “Nothing, do you understand?” and then related the story of his dinner with Auden. What that man is grappling with is the experience this memoir is wanting to shape.

It took her “six or seven years of very interrupted effort” to produce Bible and Sword. Like Morrison, Tuchman accumulated a stack of rejection slips before finding a publisher, a university press that mainly produced niche books. At age 44, Tuchman had finally become a published writer of history— a relatively unknown writer with a small readership, but a published writer nonetheless. And like Morrison, she’d become compulsive about her work, unable to stop herself, one question leading to another, project after project, book after book.

After Tuchman published The Guns of August, a copy of the book ended up in the hands of President John F. Kennedy, who happened to read it shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So, here we have the story of a mom at home who decides to become a writer of history. She writes a book that the president reads. The president applies the lessons of the book to help avert a nuclear war. And we’re all alive today.

Barbara Tuchman didn’t set out to save the world when she wrote her books. She was just following her encodings. Once she discovered her encodings, she simply trusted them and focused the inner fire on writing books. She didn’t stop herself with questions like “Is this a worthy use of myself?” or “What will my parents think?” or “Does my husband approve?” or “Is this going to make me famous?” or “Will it generate huge social good in the eyes of my peers?” or any of that.