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Like many people my December featured a pile of new books for Christmas. My "to be read" list is now so big that I'm on a self-imposed book buying ban until I get through a good chunk of the list.
Naturally with a week off in January I managed to get through several, but as you'll see - one of them was so big it took me most of the month to wade my way through it!
The Romanovs
I really wanted to read The Romanovs as it didn't just cover an area of history I know very little about, but the Romanov dynasty also saw several Empresses ruling in their own right. Apart from a biography of Catherine the Great I didn't really know much about this little cluster of women who managed to seize power and rule as Empress themselves.
It proved to be a fascinating read with a curious mix of "characters" and families and their impact on the different monarchs. There was also a broad scope of the key points of various reigns while still retaining enough detail to make it interesting.
My only complaint is that it was split into sections, one for each monarch. But these sections weren't then broken down into smaller chapters so I often had to stop at the end of a paragraph, rather than the more natural stopping point of the end of a chapter.
But that is one small complaint and it certainly shouldn't detract from this book being an excellent read.
The Templars
I'm a big fan of Dan Jones' work and have been ever since I read his book "The Plantagenets" (my first copy of which was badly glued and fell apart after one read, at which point I promptly bought an eBook copy and then after a few months replaced my broken paperback).
As you can tell from the title this work looks at the Knights Templar. This order of knights was set up in Jerusalem, ostensibly to provide protection to Christians in the Middle East and to safely escort pilgrims to the Holy City. The order was dismantled and banned in the 13th century and since then conspiracy theories have popped up over the centuries. In particular Jones highlights at the end of the book the obsession certain right wing groups have with the imagery of the Templars and how it has been manipulated until it's hard to find the real history.
Once again I found it really hard to put this book down. Last year I finally read several books on the medieval obsession with crusading so I felt like I had a good knowledge base going into this. Jones does a really good job of showing the rise and eventual fall of the Templars, and how they were eventually pushed out, first from Jerusalem and then the Middle East, before the order finally collapsed in Europe after being persecuted by King Philip IV of France.
Again this is an excellent book, and I would highly recommend that you read it after completing Jones' other book on this period - Crusaders.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Frederick Douglass was an American orator in the 19th century. He was born a slave, escaped and later purchased his freedom, and became an important figure in the abolition and civil rights movements. In many of his speeches he stood and shared his lived experience and his struggles with his audience, and explain first hand why slavery had to be abolished.
The book is huge at over 700 pages. I will admit I struggle with books that big. Most of my reading time is done in my lunch break and at the weekend so if it takes longer than a week to finish a book I feel like it's starting to drag. And sadly that happened for this book, which meant that it took me most of January to get through it.
Despite my problems with perseverence it was an interesting book. The author, David W. Blight, charts Douglass' life from his earliest days on a plantation to his sudden death at home at the age of either 77 or 78. In between Blight examines the influences on his life, the racism he experienced from childhood, and his struggles to provide for his family as his children grew up.
One thing this book made very clear to me is how little I know about American history! I know the very basics but I'm British and there isn't a lot about it in our own history lessons. There were references to various Civil War battles, for example, that I'm sure I've heard about but would actually struggle to locate on a map let alone tell you any details about them.
But I did particularly enjoy the references to Douglass' family and home life. One thing I found especially interesting was how often Blight pointed out the silence in the records relating to Douglass' first wife Anna Murray. Anna had been born free but had grown up illiterate, although not innumerate. As a result there's a dearth of information about her as, unlike her husband, she never wrote her own biography or a diary, nor was she able to write letters back to him in her own hand. Often such women are left without their silence even pointed out, but Blight repeatedly points out how we miss her side of things and how this skews our opinion of Douglass.
Yes, I struggled with this book. But it was mostly down to my own laziness and my lack of knowledge about American history. I hope I can come back to re-read this in the future once I've picked up some more books on the Civil War period and the decades around it.
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