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daumari's review against another edition
3.0
Another from my failed attempt to do categories for winter reading program. The Stuarts are interesting, but it didn't grab me as much as Tudor drama does. That being said, it was a nice recall back to AP Euro and the doc we watched that had an overly dramatic reenactment of Charles I's beheading.
mcsangel2's review against another edition
3.0
A *very* compressed history of 400 years of the House of Stuart (Stewart). Brief, but useful as an introduction.
elvenavari's review against another edition
2.0
I appreciate the way each king got their own chapter, this helped in separating one James from every other James. I'm pretty iffy on the sources Massie used for his information.
holtfan's review
2.0
While a good glance at the entire Stuart family, the author presents several things as facts that are still debated by historians. I found that annoying.
sjstuart's review against another edition
3.0
I'm not a Scottish or royal history buff, by any means; I read this book because I share the same last name as the line of monarchs. That (lack of) background probably affected my enjoyment of the book a bit, as I wasn't familiar with all of the details of Scottish and English history and geography that were assumed. As a result, I read this book with Wikipedia at my elbow as a study guide. Unfortunately, I soon began to realize that the Wikipedia articles were usually about as engaging as and far more informative than the book itself.
My complaint is partly Massie's writing style, which I wasn't impressed with. His tone is a little academic or formal, even though he's clearly trying to write an accessible, popular history. He's a well known, prolific and apparently very popular author, so maybe it's just me. His forte is historical fiction, and I have to imagine that those novels must be written more engagingly. In this book, he has split the difference between historical fiction and history: he adopts a slightly pedantic style to sound authoritative, while having no qualms about reporting others' fictionalized accounts of historical events. I didn't find this combination appealing, and would rather read a bona fide historical account, or an unabashed historical fiction.
I don't want to be entirely negative, though. I did learn a lot, and enjoyed the result, if not the process.
My complaint is partly Massie's writing style, which I wasn't impressed with. His tone is a little academic or formal, even though he's clearly trying to write an accessible, popular history. He's a well known, prolific and apparently very popular author, so maybe it's just me. His forte is historical fiction, and I have to imagine that those novels must be written more engagingly. In this book, he has split the difference between historical fiction and history: he adopts a slightly pedantic style to sound authoritative, while having no qualms about reporting others' fictionalized accounts of historical events. I didn't find this combination appealing, and would rather read a bona fide historical account, or an unabashed historical fiction.
I don't want to be entirely negative, though. I did learn a lot, and enjoyed the result, if not the process.
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