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montanomad 's review for:
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
It took me a while to get into this one. The large cast and the general trickiness of Russian names (full names, patronymics, diminutive names, etc.) took a while to get up-to-speed on, but it picked up once the shooting started and really hit its stride when Napoleon invaded Russia. I guess I liked war more than peace. Tolstoy's interjections on the European politics and the causes of the war were interesting at first, but became repetitive and eventually pedantic at the very end. I thought he did a nice job tracking the various families and working them into the framework of Russia history. I always glimpses into historical Russian politics and society interesting, and the descriptions of the way armies operated in that time period is astounding. I didn't find the book as "sweeping" and "epic" as advertised, but I'm used to some of Stephen King's more ambitious works, such as The Stand and Under the Dome; however, I imagine War and Peace was quite an accomplishment in its day and I will give him props for breaking ground for authors that followed.