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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
informative
slow-paced
Colin Thubron's book about the border between China and Russia prompted me to learn more about Russia, particularly about Stalin. Well, this book is ground-breaking for the author's uncovering of hitherto hidden documents and his interviews with the quite elderly people who knew Stalin in his salad days. But the granular details about where Stalin went when and who he saw overwhelm the story, and I could never quite grasp the big picture. Maybe I will turn to Wikipedia or a good young adult biography.
dark
informative
dark
informative
medium-paced
Very well researched and detailed. I listened to it on audio, which I think was better than reading it myself, since the names were so confusing and complicated. I look forward to reading The Court of the Red Tsar.
informative
slow-paced
Very dense, this book is. Many bits of info, I will use. Soso in drag, I will not forget.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
This book starts with the Birth of Stalin's parents and follows him from birth to the October revolution when the Bolsheviks' seized power. There were so many things in Stalin's younger life that it seems suprising he survived them to become the dictator he was. Amongst them a drunken abusive father, catching small pox, many exiles by the Czar to Siberia etc where temperatures could drop to -3o or even lower.
stalin was an amazing revolutionary and poet, and its interesting to see how someone so focused and driven could become a monster
I learnt some new stuff and I didn’t get bored which is about all I really ask from non fiction. Well, maybe you could add some humour but in this case that probably would’ve been a little hard.
My only complaint would be that the author clearly didn’t like Trotsky and constantly dismissed him as a non-entity or overrated except when it helped with the narrative he was creating here, which was that Stalin was the true genius of the revolution.
My only complaint would be that the author clearly didn’t like Trotsky and constantly dismissed him as a non-entity or overrated except when it helped with the narrative he was creating here, which was that Stalin was the true genius of the revolution.