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mark_lm's review against another edition
4.0
This history is largely a biography of the two principal characters involved in the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade, Lords Cardigan and Lucan. It is unusually well written and, as the saying goes, “reads like a novel”. The sad pleasure that one finds in reading the history of great catastrophes is strongly stimulated in this account of two unpleasant and imperious aristocrats who almost seem to have been specifically created to end up bumbling into disaster in Crimea. The only possible structural flaw is an inserted chapter on the Irish potato famine, but it does bear on the life of Lord Lucan; the author, Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith, wrote a book about the famine that was published nine years later in 1962. I also plan to find a copy of her biography of Florence Nightingale published in 1950.
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The author attributes the extravagant behavior of one or two characters to their being of Irish and Italian heritage, yet she does not attribute the behavior of the two mental deviants about whom the story is told to their being British.
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The author attributes the extravagant behavior of one or two characters to their being of Irish and Italian heritage, yet she does not attribute the behavior of the two mental deviants about whom the story is told to their being British.
giovannnaz's review against another edition
3.0
I have to admit I started this book with a bad attitude, planning to skim it--it wasn't the one I wanted to read. In the end, I had to admit it was good popular history--shocking how ridiculous the guys in charge were--sound familiar? Nice to know that if nothing else, at a remove of 150 years people agree how ridiculous and disastrous leaders can be. Bonus: as a knitter, it's always fun to read about Raglans, Cardigans, and Balaclavas.
emilymcmc's review
5.0
Aside from being one of the most accessible accounts of what the English did to the Irish ... this is one of those books that pulls together threads you know and threads you don't into one unstoppably readable story.
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