Book : The Romanovs 1613-1918 - Montefiore, Simon Sebag

-Titulo Original : The Romanovs 1613-1918

-Fabricante :

Vintage

-Descripcion Original:

Review “Simon Sebag Montefiores The Romanovs is epic history on the grandest scale. . . . A story of conspiracy, drunken coups, assassination, torture, impaling, breaking on the wheel, lethal floggings with the knout, sexual and alcoholic excess, charlatans and pretenders, flamboyant wealth based on a grinding serfdom, and, not surprisingly, a vicious cycle of repression and revolt. Game of Thrones seems like the proverbial vicars tea party in comparison. . . . Reading Montefiores excellent account, it is hard to imagine how the monarchy could ever have survived under their catastrophic leadership.” -Antony Beevor, Financial Times“Don’t let its size fool you: There’s never been a more inviting 700-plus-page historical tome. That’s because the author, who matches rigorous scholarship with a novelist’s eye for delicious details, is clearly having so much fun. And why not? In three centuries, the Romanovs produced titans and weaklings, war and peace, and enough salacious behavior to make us say, ‘Turn off thy Kardashians! Pick up thy Montefiore!’”-O, The Oprah Magazine (Oprah’s 10 favorite books of 2016) “Spellbinding . . . it takes true historical daring to tackle such an immense subject. . . . Montefiore’s novelistic gift of drawing vivid characters with a few choice words never fails him. . . . The main portraits are invariably memorable. . . . This monumental work is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in Russian history and the doomed dynasty of the Romanovs.” -Olga Grushin, The New York Times Book Review“Wonderfully written and fascinating down to the last footnote. . . . [Montefiore’s] style is polished, lively, informed. . . . Montefiore is an accomplished storyteller, and what might have been a plodding succession of reigns reads instead like a novel-specifically, in its interplay of themes and motifs, and especially its pairing of opposites, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. . . . [The Romanovs’] stories-freshened, compressed, filled in and corrected-achieve new power and meaning in this fast-moving narrative. . . . Like a novel, too, this is a hard book to put down. As historical reconstruction and as storytelling, The Romanovs is an achievement of the first rank.” -David Walton, The Dallas Morning News“The book is a marvelous read and the last third, from fin de siecle to revolutionary cataclysm, is dazzling. . . . The pages on Nicholas and Alexandra are perhaps the best ever, economical in expression, simultaneously poignant and trenchant. Vignettes are used to reveals depths of personality. . . . And just as a novelist wields dialogue, Montefiore renders of the birth of each daughter with pithy quotations from memoirs. Here in the sweeping story of the downfall, the salaciousness delivers more than just sparkling passages as in Montefiore’s incisive telling of Rasputin’s machinations and murder or his accounts of the executions of 18 Romanovs in 1918. . . . Thanks to the talents of Simon Sebag Montefiore, Romanov rule will hereafter appear still more improbable and haunted.” -Stephen Kotkin, The Wall Street Journal“Drawing on a wide array of Russian sources, Sebag Montefiore paints an unforgettable portrait of characters fascinating and charismatic, odd and odious. Magnificent palaces, elaborate balls, and a culture that produced Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy existed alongside pogroms, torture and murder . . . Monarchs over one-sixth of the globe, they played at Western niceties while clinging to Byzantine notions of absolute rule. . . . Erudite and entertaining.” -Greg King, The Washington Post“It is a considerable achievement of expository prose that the detailed research that underpins this account of the Romanovs and their courts makes this long book never less than readable.” -Claire Hopley, The Washington Times “Mr. Montefiore, whose research is extensive, has an ear for the pithy anecdote. . . . The depth of his research has resulted in reassessments