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Bismarck: A Life (2011)

by Jonathan Steinberg(Favorite Author)

3.56 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0199782520 (ISBN13: 9780199782529)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

review 1: The key strength of this biography was that you can get a very strong sense of the man and his personality. Steinberg gave me such a detailed impression, that I could almost hear the statesman's voice in my head, and imagine his handshake.The real weakness was that the author made a mess out of the other key part of a biography, the context. I often felt like I had only a fragmentary understanding for the environment in which Bismarck operated. The loss as a reader is that I could make sense of his internal motivations for making certain decisions, but the external ones were often blurred or opaque. Perhaps he was afraid of losing the reader's interest. But come on - the sort of person who'd bother to pick up an 700+ page work on an old German statesman is not going to... more mind the historian going into the weeds a bit. Know your audience, sir.
review 2: It took only a few pages of this book for me to realize that I had only a bare, superficial knowledge of Bismarck and his era and almost all the assumptions I had about him were false. Steinberg emphasizes his contradictions and the power of his personality - which was apparently the only power he had, as he acted as a dictator with no legal or constitutional basis for his authority. Heavy reading, but very interesting. less

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