Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Just Okay

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

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Series: The Romanovs. This is a cheat as I don’t feel like these books truly form a series, but according to Goodreads they are. I read Nicholas and Alexandra (per Goodreads, #3 in this series) in 2018 (review here). Catherine the Great is considered #2 in the series. What I remembered about this series prior to reading this book: A lot, because I loved Nicholas and Alexandra. I’ve been looking forward to reading this book ever since. Why I stopped reading the series: I mean, […]

You Can Call it Fate or Chance, but We Made it Happen

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The most interesting parts of history are the moments that probably seemed small at the time they happened, but whose effects rippled throughout the entire world. And I can’t think of a single period in history more full of those little moments all coming together to disastrous effect than the reign of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. Nicholas became the Tsar in 1894 and abdicated in 1917, during the World War I. Besides being the last Tsar of Russia, he and his wife […]

Catherine is great, this book is not.

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While I enjoyed learning more about Catherine the Great, I did not enjoy this particular book very much. The author was clearly totally in the bag for Catherine which, while understandable (Elizabeth I is my homegirl, yo), does not make for the most well balanced of books. I mean, he seemed to take as gospel everything Catherine had to say about her husband, but it was in Catherine’s best interest that Peter III be seen as an idiot, no? I’m not saying he wasn’t, because […]



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