In the last few years I’ve read a couple of books by Simon Sebag Montefiore, and this one about the history of the Romanov dynasty was the first one.
I listened to this as an audiobook but I have to say, this one was pretty dense. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot, but it was a dense book. Critics seem to dislike that a book with the chief ambition of detailing the entire history of the Romanovs was very detailed? WTF. I don’t know. I expected lots of details.
The book begins a bit earlier than the Romanovs, but of course, it has to. How does a dynasty become a dynasty? It starts so much earlier than the dynasty itself. The Romanov dynasty is a story of brutality, sex, and power. Especially brutality. Did you know that the early Romanov, Alexei, made a deal with Bogdan Khmelnitsky, who has streets named after him for handing over the territory of Ukraine over to Alexei? You know what else he did? He unleashed horrific atrocities on Catholic and Jews, including, but not limited to, children being eaten in front of their parents. Yes, still considered a hero in Russia and Ukraine.
But Peter the Great! He civilized Russia and built St. Petersburg! Yes. He did. He insisted people chew with their mouths closed, poop only in specified areas, and produced a number of guides on how to, basically, not be disgusting. But did you know Peter the Great also had is son tortured to death and was obsessed with decapitation as a biological experiment?
Sometimes brutal is putting it mildly.
In addition to 300 years worth of great and terrible tsars and tsarinas, Montefiore lays out a pretty good explanation of how Russian society worked for three centuries, as well as making some interesting points about the fall of the tsar and how the Russian habits of butchery and totalitarianism transferred to the masters of the new system. Why was it that every single time real reform was proposed the tsar ultimately cracked down and refused the reforms? This happened for hundreds of years. Why is it that Russia deposed its tsar and immediately adopted another totalitarian regime? Why do the Russian people tend to lean towards this totalitarianism?
Joseph Stalin once cynically said, “The people need a tsar.” And ultimately, that is exactly what he was, and was just as bad, if not worse, than any of his predecessors.
I enjoyed this book. Be warned, it is a massive undertaking – I think like 650 pages? It was a very long audiobook. And it is a very chronological book. Montefiore could have explored more themes rather than devote so much to effort to keeping things chronological but as someone with little education on Russian history, the chronology helped me a lot. I could see why someone with a more expansive knowledge base would find it frustrating, but it is meticulously researched, written with an edge of dark humor, and very interesting.
Category Archives: history
The Romanovs, 1613 – 1918
The Lost City of the Monkey God
The Lost City of the Monkey God is a 2017 non-fiction book by Douglas Preston (who also wrote The Monster of Florence, which I didn’t realize until recently) about the efforts to discover La Ciudad Blanca in Honduras.
Legends of La Ciudad Blanca go back centuries, with stories circulating as far back as the era of the conquistadors of Spain. Naturally, La Ciudad Blanca is supposedly a civilization of legendary wealth, and people have been exploring the Honduras and Nicaragua jungles for decades, looking for the ancient ruins of the city (and probably hoping to find lots of gold). Archeologists, anthropologists and the other ‘ists’ who study these things now believe that while it’s likely such a settlement did exist, it was probably a larger civilization over a larger area that just one specific city.
Preston’s book takes on one such effort to locate what’s left of the civilization. The book debunks claims to have found such a city in the 1930s (when these exploration expeditions were quite common). Those 1930s expeditions are where the book gets its name from, though.
Preston ends up joining a joint Honduran & American expedition to a previously unsearched area, where lidar technology indicates extensive archaeological sites hidden by the rainforest. The site ends up being a large pre-Hispanic settlement – with plazas, terracing, canals, roads, etc… The site indicated that in this area once was an extensive, fairly advanced civilization. It was also determined to be abandoned approximately 500 years ago. While this city was an invaluable find, the existence of La Ciudad Blanca remains uncertain. The city Preston’s expedition found is modernly called ‘City of the Jaguar.’
Preston’s book was quite interesting and I learned a lot from it (I don’t know that much about South America, so it’s not surprising I learned a lot). In addition to the discovery of the abandoned settlement, Preston recounts the history and geography of the area, mostly remote tropical rainforest, as well as the trials and tribulations of the expedition – dehydration, mud, parasites, poisonous snakes. So, you know, all everyone’s favorite things.
The book was interesting and I learned a lot. Would recommend.
The Thursday Next Novel Series
Thursday Next is the protagonist of a book series I accidentally stumbled on 2019. I believe I bought One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde at an airport when I forgot my own book, not realizing it was part of a series. I enjoyed it in spite of being somewhat confused by it (I definitely remember reading it and in the middle having a moment of clarity where the entire story made sense).
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series currently stand as such:
Series 1:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
Series 2 (so far):
First Among Sequels
One of Our Thursdays is Missing
The Woman Who Died A Lot
In 2019, I read/listened to four Thursday Next novels. The second novel of the second series, and the first three novels of the first series. The only reason I didn’t continue is that I couldn’t find the later books as audiobooks, although as I was writing this I went back to check and was able to borrow Something Rotten as an audiobook right away (and did so, will be listening to it after my current book).
I am sort of at a loss as where to begin “reviewing” the Thursday Next series, as the universe created around them is one of the most creative and complex I’ve read outside of high fantasy. The Thursday Next wikipedia page describes the stories as “comic fantasy, alternate history mystery novels” and that’s about as good a genre breakdown as you’re going to get.
Thursday herself is an engaging character, in her mid thirties and quite bright, working in the Literary Detective section. Literature is much more popular in Thursday’s world than ours, and much of the plot is centered around classic literature.
Fforde’s writing is full of wordplay – alliteration and puns abound – and he plays with traditional genres. There’s metafiction, fantasy, and parody. There are many, many literary references that made me grin. I quite enjoyed the novels and highly recommend them to all nerds who like literature and wordplay. I am pleasantly surprised to have Something Rotten on my audiobook shelf and look forward to trying to find the other books in the series.
Absolutely recommend.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a bunch of heavy history books in 2019, and William Shirer’s massive tome on Adolf Hitler’s rise to and fall from power was the heaviest, literally and figuratively.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is the longest book I’ve ever read/listened to (as I did a combination of both). The book was 1280 pages and the audiobook clocked in at almost 57 hours.
I can’t really begin to recap this book in any real way except that it was by far the most detailed book on the Third Reich (or possibly anything) that I’ve ever read. It was very interesting and I learned a lot from it, but I also don’t know how much of it is looked at the same way, as the book is 50 years old and wasn’t written long after the time period it was recapping. (If you go by the theory that history isn’t really understood until 50 years after the events in question, it’s harder to ascertain that Shirer, while presenting a large amount of information, may have interpreted some of that information incorrectly.)
The book was highly praised when it came out, but wasn’t without its critics. Apparently the biggest critics were of those who disagreed with the sonderweg theory, but this theory was common in American scholarship at the time. With only some general knowledge on the sonderweg thesis from the book and then reading a bit further on the web, it sounds like the German history version of ‘Intelligent Design.’ Nonsense to me, basically. The book was also criticized as not academic enough, and some German history scholars thought it was a big failure based on the writer not knowing enough German history, not understanding totalitarian regimes, not knowing enough about “current” German Nazi scholarship (I don’t understand that critique at all), etc…
It’s a good general history book. Even with the sonderweg thesis and the author’s not so well hidden homophobia, this book is a readable, understandable breakdown of how Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, which included biographical elements about Hitler (and many of his supporting cast of criminals) as well as the social environment of the time. Considering how much history tends to forget, this book, already 60 years old, will serve as a reminder for years to come.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base
I did a couple of pretty heavy history books in 2019, and this one was by far the wildest. Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is exactly the kind of book anyone interested in aviation and military history would want to read.
I originally borrowed Area 51 as an audiobook from the library but enjoyed it so much I ended up buying an actual copy of the book. Jacobsen interviews surviving military and aviation professionals who spent time in Area 51, as well as surviving participants of the US nuclear programs during the second World War and the Cold War.
With all the UFO stuff Area 51 is famous for, a lot of the other history surrounding the area can get lost. The history and use of the base is tightly guarded, which has fed into the legend, but the area is, first and foremost, a military base called Homey Airport or Groom Lake. A lot of the secrecy surrounding the base is due to the military developments taking place there, not aliens. Jacobsen documents the planes/programs developed, built, and tested out there (out there being the Nevada desert, for anyone who doesn’t know) in great detail. Included on the list of Area 51 programs was the U-2 program.
Nuclear testing/development was also taking place out there. In the book Jacobsen interviews Richard Mingus, who worked as security guard at the base for decades. He was even there when the base came under attack during a nuclear test. It turned out to not really be under attack, but it was a great story and I really liked Mingus as he came across.
The book was really interesting. It really was, I very much enjoyed it.
But where it failed was the alien stuff.
I’m about to spoil you.
If you want to be surprised about Jacobsen’s alien hot take, I am telling you stop reading here.
Stop.
Stop.
You asked for it.
Jacobsen claims that the infamous crafts/beings rumored to have crashed in the Nevada desert were, essentially, human guinea pigs flying crafts developed by the USSR. Stalin hired infamous Nazi “doctor” Josef Mengele to develop “grotesque, child size aviators” to pilot crafts to America that would produce the kind of hysteria that happened after Orson Welles’ broadcast of his 1938 radio program, War of the Worlds. The bodies found at the crash site were, ultimately, mutilated children. And this is what has been top secret for 75 years.
While the explanation isn’t any less plausible than an alien spaceship crash, it somehow actually feels like more of a stretch. I wouldn’t put it past Mengele or Stalin to attempt such an evil thing (obviously), but it still just seems too far fetched.
The book is criticized by some for being poorly sourced with errors, however, based on what I read, it seemed unclear if the sources were wrong or the translation into entertainment caused the errors. I think the idea of the UFO stuff being a Soviet hoax is the main source of the outrage from critics. The military and aviation stuff seems reasonably well done, although at least one person took issue with the source Jacobsen used for her information on the Manhattan Project.
Overall, I enjoyed the book tremendously. I highly recommend it if you’re into twentieth century American history, from World War II to the Cold War.
The Art of the English Murder
Lucy Worsley’s The Art of the English Murder is a non-fiction book that follows the history of British crime as entertainment – from true stories, such as that of the Ratcliff Highway Murders and the infamous Jack the Ripper, to fictional murderers and their detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot and beyond.
The British public’s fascination with real crime led to the creation of the crime fiction genre, inspiring novels, plays, short stories, art, films, and various other mediums. Worsley’s engaging, witty text takes us through from the early nineteenth century through to the mid-late twentieth.
It’s interesting, as Worsley points out, that after a long hard day at work, toiling in the mines, or the fields, or behind a desk, a person comes home and flips on the television or opens a book and participates as an audience member in a good murder. They turn to grisly death for relaxation, and if you think about it, it’s quite bizarre.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this book. It was a quick, interesting look at one of the main forms of entertainment for the last hundred and fifty or so years. I especially like the second half of the book, focused on the detectives of these stories.
The one thing about the book I found a little disruptive was the tendency of Worsley to jump around, however, I learned later that this book actually accompanies a television series, which explains a lot of this, as the best way to tell a story on TV and in a book aren’t always the same. Either way, I recommend this little piece of history academia, and highly recommend it, especially if you enjoy murder mysteries, the way I do.
The Devil in the White City
The third (and final) book by Erik Larson in 2019 was The Devil in the White City.
Like Larson’s other works, he weaves several different narratives together and highlights how certain circumstances align into a perfect storm for a certain disaster to happen. In this case, the World’s Fair came to Chicago in 1893 and so did H.H. Holmes, the noted serial killer.
The World’s Fair storyline follows Daniel Burnham, in his job to build the fair, and H.H. Holmes, in the building of his murder castle. Once again, Larson’s narrative indicates a perfect storm – one of the reasons Holmes got away with his murder castle for so long was because there were so many people in Chicago in 1893.
I found Holmes to be the most interesting part of the book, but that isn’t surprising considering my interest in serial killers. Holmes was a jack of all trades criminal – he committed insurance fraud, arson, bigamy, grave robbing, and so on, not just murder. Holmes confessed to 27 murders (including people authorities could verify as still living, lol) but ended up being tried and executed for just one – his partner in insurance fraud, Benjamin Pitezel. The number of Holmes’ victims is unknown, but the conservative estimates put his number of victims at 10-34, and more liberal estimates put him at 200+. There’s really no way to tell.
It was an interesting story. Even Burnham’s half of the narrative wasn’t boring, it just wasn’t Holmes’ half. It was interesting learning about the architecture for an event that wasn’t permanent, and ever more interesting learning how Burnham managed it when stuff happened like…his investor died.
Overall, I enjoyed this immensely. Interestingly, Leonardo DiCaprio acquired the film rights to this book some time ago. 2010 maybe? The project has been delayed, but supposedly now is in development to be a television series.
Larson has a couple of other books out, that I admittedly am not in a rush to get to but would probably enjoy. If I had to rank the three I read in 2019, I’d rank them as such:
1. In the Garden of Beasts
2. The Devil in the White City
3. Dead Wake
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
The second of Erik Larson’s books I read in 2019 was Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.
“Dead wake” is a maritime term for the disturbance that lingers on the surface of the sea long after the passage of a vessel—or a torpedo.
The RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner that Germany sunk during World War I, eleven miles off the coast of Ireland. 1198 people died in the disaster, and it was one of the key events used to build support for entering World War I in the United States (along with the Zimmerman Telegram, but that came later).
Larson follows the ship from its launch in New York to its watery grave, following events that culminated in one of the great maritime disasters of the twentieth century. It’s always so amazing to me how many things have to go exactly right (or wrong depending on your point of view) for a major event like this to actually take place. Larson’s writing makes it so clear how if even just a few circumstances change, the Lusitania sinking probably never would have happened. It’s an incredible read in the sheer scale of circumstances that needed to converge.
The book also follows passengers of the ship. This seems to bother some people in the reviews I read of the book at the time? People seem annoyed that the whole book doesn’t focus entirely on the sinking and I find this stupid. Larson’s books are narrative, and he always works in these details into that narrative. If you want a book that only describes facts of a disaster, read a textbook. I don’t know if people just don’t know what they’re signing up for or what, but most of Larson’s books are like this, and it’s fine with me. These are the kinds of details that bring history to life in my opinion. It’s great to know straight history, but it’s very easy to forget reading a textbook over a hundred years later, that people died in that sinking. Telling their stories keeps their memories alive. It’s all well and good to abstractly know that 1198 people died in the sinking of the Lusitania; it’s another to know who some of them were, what their story was, why they were on board. That’s living history in a way a textbook could never be.
All that said, I had trouble enjoying this book, lol. I have a theory I drowned in a past life on a boat like this, because you couldn’t get me near one. I feel anxious just thinking about it now. But I enjoyed the book in the sense that it was a good history book and I enjoyed learning about the Lusitania and its passengers. It was a good, well written read that taught a ton of history without making me feel like I was reading a history book at all.
In The Garden of Beasts
I did a couple of books by Erik Larson in 2019, with In the Garden of Beasts being the first one. Obviously there is no shortage of books chronicling the rise of the Hitler and the Third Reich. This would be one of those, except from a slightly different perspective than other books.
This book followed American ambassador William Dodd from 1933 to 1937, when he lived in Berlin with his family. Dodd initially hoped that the Nazi government would become more moderate with time (which obviously did not happen) and occasionally protested the Nazi government’s atrocities leading up to the war. The story also follows his daughter Martha, who was either separated or divorced, and her being swept up in the Berlin social scene. She had several “liasions” with the German social elite, including with at least one fairly high ranking Nazi officer, Rudolf Diels, I think it was? Diels was the original head of the Gestapo, or part of the Gestapo before it was completely centralized. So it was before Goring conceded control of the Gestapo to Himmler, or something like that. If I remember correctly, Diels was a protégé of Goring. That’s why he wasn’t killed in the Night of the Long Knives. Goring warned him and got him out, something to that extent. It makes sense because in the power struggle between Himmler and Goring, Himmler probably wouldn’t go after his own protégé.
Diels wasn’t executed after the war. He was associated with Goring and I think married a cousin of his, but wasn’t actually involved much after being ousted as the Gestapo chief in the 1930s. He refused to order the arrest of Jews in like, 1940 or 1941, and apparently only Goring’s influence kept him out of prison.
I really hope I’m remembering the right guy, lol.
The book also deals with how Dodd was being sabotaged at home, or at least badmouthed. Dodd was a personal friend of FDR, who thought he was doing an extraordinary job, but he was disliked and distrusted but the State Department because he wasn’t one of their good ol’ boys. Sounds like a familiar part of anyone’s story who wasn’t a good ol’ boy.
I really enjoyed this book, and Larson’s books in general. His books tell interesting stories that are frequently well known but from perspectives that aren’t entirely fleshed out, and his writing itself is scholarly but accessible as he weaves different points of view into one overarching storyline to detail one historical event.
Fun fact: the title is a translation of ‘Tiergarten,’ a popular park and zoo in Berlin.
The Winternight Trilogy
Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy is an adult historical fantasy series that consists of three books:
The Bear and the Nightingale
The Girl in the Tower
The Winter of the Witch
I listened to all of them in 2019, and I loved them so much that I bought them as books.
These books contained what was, by far, my favorite story of 2019 and I loved the saga so much that I cried when it was over (not a typical reaction for me).
The series centers on Vasilisa Petrovna, or Vasya, the youngest of five children in a remote Russian village. Her father is the boyar of the village (basically a lord in the Eastern European feudal system), and Vasya is the only (living) member of her family who has the ability to see creatures of Russian folklore, such as the domovoy who lives in their home, the rusalka of a lake in the forest, the bannik of the bathhouse, and Morozko, the frost king.
The story follows Vasya’s journey for personal freedom, from adolescent to young adult woman, within the confines of both her gender and her society’s values in medieval Russia. She is a likable and compelling heroine, and I *really* liked her. Per the author: “She is strong enough to embrace her differences, but she still reads as a woman of her time.” I felt alternately elated and terrible for her, as she struggled to do what was right for herself, her family, and eventually her country. The world building was impressive and immersive, and I enjoyed wandering through the forests with Vasya and Solovey.
There are also clear elements of Russian folklore and Slavic myth woven into Vasya’s tale, and I learned more about the history of medieval Russia than I ever learned in school. My favorite creature was definitely the domovoy, although I liked Morozko a lot too. There is also insight into Russian names, which I have never been able to figure out before (not that I extensively tried), but the explanations of how names work in the translation from Russian to English made this book *much* easier to understand.
In case you can’t tell, I highly recommend this novel series. You know how sometimes you leave a story feeling like you’ve been changed? I felt like that here. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I came out in love with Vasya’s world and plan to reread the series again in the not too distant future. I hope everyone else who reads it enjoys it as much as I did. I loved it.
words in scarlet ink 