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lightreadsPretty much what it says on the tin.
I'm a bit ambivalent – it's quite readable (and appropriately painful in places) – but there was also a shocking lack of primary sources. And you can't tell me raging egoists like the Romanovs didn't write letters and diaries, because I'll call you a liar. I might more easily believe a lot of it didn't survive, but this book was a lot more 'an entire century compressed and themed and fabricated into inevitable-feeling order' than I like in my history, and that's partly for a lack of voices other than the historian's.
I'm a bit ambivalent – it's quite readable (and appropriately painful in places) – but there was also a shocking lack of primary sources. And you can't tell me raging egoists like the Romanovs didn't write letters and diaries, because I'll call you a liar. I might more easily believe a lot of it didn't survive, but this book was a lot more 'an entire century compressed and themed and fabricated into inevitable-feeling order' than I like in my history, and that's partly for a lack of voices other than the historian's.