This is an astonishing book about the last Imperial Family of Russia. Crisp text backed up with amazing and wonderful array of exclusive, never-before seen photographs from the Russian State Archive. Truly, a book that will change your view on the Romanovs.
Highly recommended to those who build a library on the Romanovs.
Great job, Leppi Publications!!!

If you are a Romanov history buff, you MUST get this book. Photos that you won't see in other books, excerpts from personal letters, it's just a one-of-a-kind book. This book touched a place in me that actually hurt when I thought of the family and how they were killed. When you read the girls letters, see their drawings, you know they were sheltered, sweet, loving girls, whose last moments must have been horrific. alix and Nicky, not realizing the depths to which Imperial russia was falling, brought about their families demise, although they had been warned. Rasputin took total advantage of alix's grief, she only wanted her son to live. A beautiful and heartbreaking book. I own a library of Romanov/Imperial russia books, and this one is my favorite.

One of the best coffee-table books on one of the most beloved and tragic families of this century. Several photos show Nicholas and Alexandra before the birth of their first child, Olga, until the house arrest of the family. With an accompanying text and several annonations, this poignant photo album/book show the lives of the Romanovs through carefully chosen pictures from the Russian archives. Leafing through the pages of the book will make one feel transported to a different era, the time of Imperial Russia. A must for Romanov memorabilia collectors and historians.

I chose this title, because it was true, at least for me. As Americans, we (some of us, not all) "think" Russians are not "very intelligent", "backward" and even, "less than human."
After reading this book, I tend to "get on my soapbox" to help people understand what few choices, the Russian people ever had in the outcomes of their lives! I never knew this before purchasing and reading Mr. Lincoln's book!
If you cannot be convinced by the poverty imposed on the Russians through Mr. Lincoln's words, you will be convinced by the heart-wrenching photographs; the children who appear as hopeless, hovels designed as homes with animals living within, death from starvation was not uncommon. And all the time, Russia refused (those in power prior to the Revolution)to feed her people, wheat was being shipped to other European countries.
And the Russians never questioned the motives of the Tsar; after the Revolution, they still starved and were murdered by Stalin and Hitler.
We need to change our attitudes and this book did it for me.

In the forward, W. Bruce Lincoln states the book is "...an effort to explore the lives, thoughts, hopes, and dreams of the men and women who lived in the world's largest empire and to convey some sense of the tensions that tore at the fabric of their existence on the eve of the Great War and the Revolution of 1917." In this effort he succeeds brilliantly.

We see portraits of Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas II, Pobedonostsev, Lenin, Rasputin, and a host of other generals, officials and ordinary people who shaped that era.

We get an insider's look at what life was like in a peasant community, inside the peasant's izba or house, and their attitudes towards schooling, medicine and religion. We go inside the growing factories and the slums the workers inhabited in the cities with rapidly developing industry. We see the new nobility of the industrial barons, the revolutionaries fighting the tsarist autocracy, the defenders of the Old Order...all come to life in these pages.

Graphic descriptions are given of the vicious pogroms against Jews. The impact of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in both economic and a political aspects is covered. The 1904 war with Japan is there with its criminally incompetent generals and and admirals and the war's impact on the development of the Revolution of 1905 as well as the mood of the populace as the nations slides toward the Great War.

This well written, illuminating, detailed and well documented book is a classic work on the Russian society of those years and fleshes out the soul of Russia as few other books do. 16 pages of photos. Highly recommended.

The book I ordered, In War's Dark Shadow, was exactly as the seller described it - in perfect condition. Since the book is not longer in print, I feel lucky to find one that looks as if it has never been used. The book was shipped promptly, and the seller was a pleasure to work with. I highly recommend this seller!

thanks!

Alexander Gerschenkron is the type of man many of us would like to be: smart, charming, interested in the world, charismatic, etc. His grandson, Nicholas Dawidoff, seemingly captured his life in a surprisingly honest and thoughtful manner. I say "suprisingly honest" because one could certainly understand if Dawidoff were to give in to hero worship -- given the important role his grandfather played in his upbringing. But Dawidoff saves the hero worship and the highly personal anecdotes for the opening and concluding chapters. The 300 or so pages in between give a very balanced depiction of a complicated man, and that's the stuff of great biography. The first half of the book is a real page-turner, chronicling Gerschenkron's difficult times as a young man in revolutionary Russia and fascist Austria. How could Dawidoff possibly keep up this pace once his grandfather settles down as an educator at Harvard? Well, he doesn't, through no fault of his own. Dawidoff's depiction of Gershenkron's latter life is beautifully written, but the exciting pace of the earlier pages simply can't be sustained. Dawidoff clearly spent a great amount of time interviewing Gerschenkron's colleagues and students, most of whom (although not all) were effusive in their praise. But the book tended to feel slightly repetitious toward the end with the ongoing remembrances and non-related anecdotes. For one so close to the story, Dawidoff managed to expertly review and analyze Gerschenkron's complicated doting relationship with his wife, Erica. Also, a wonderfully telling anecdote at the end of the book reveals not only Gerschenkron's character, but Dawidoff's patient understanding, as well. Although Gerschenkron was an expert chess player, somehow he managed to lose his queen to the 14-year-old Dawidoff. Gerschenkron swept his arm across the board, spilling all the pieces onto the floor. "Num, num," he said. "Let's go eat lunch."

Maybe you had a grandfather who was quite wonderful, but you did not have a grandfather who was wonderful like Nicholas Dawidoff's grandfather was wonderful. Dawidoff's charming biography of his grandfather, _The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World_ (Pantheon) starts with his own memories of Alexander Gerschenkron. For instance, Gerschenkron, known as "Shura" within his family, had an arsenal of fly swatters, each of just the proper color and heft for its particular target. The baby blue flyswatter was just the thing for his particular enemy, the wasps, because they were vicious, and the mild color would make them let down their guard. If he were successful in swatting the wasp (not often), he would give "lengthy disquisitions on swatting technique." He would never allow the insect body to be cleaned up, for he "claimed they were deterrents, that other yellowjackets would encounter their unfortunate colleague and feel inclined to keep away themselves."

Shura was, to be sure, a character. But he was also brilliant in an obsessively academic way. He mastered some two dozen languages, but his field of expertise was not language. He was able to discourse on (and write academic treatments of) _Hamlet_ and _Dr. Zhivago_, but he did not teach literature. He was an economist, a quintessential Harvard professor who left a lasting mark on economic thought with his theory of "economic backwardness." He had a rather exciting early life, fleeing the Russian Revolution, and then fleeing the Nazis, before he found himself in the economic department of Harvard that was to be his academic home. He was a natural show-off. He could certainly be obnoxious and overbearing, and his students often felt they were not measuring up to his superhuman standards, but none of them forgot him, and he left a strong mark on the next generation of economists. Dawidoff makes the case that his standards were so exacting, and his sense of the overwhelming complexity of history and economics so complete, that he constantly spent time in library stacks gaining more information, but was intimidated about committing himself in print. He did, however, play chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, disparage Vladimir Nabokov for an inept translation of Pushkin, and charm Marlene Dietrich to give him her phone number.

One of the great strengths of this engaging book is that it makes Shura's wide-ranging academic endeavors almost as exciting as his flights from political oppression. The love of reading and the love of learning just for the sake of exercising one's mind could not have a finer exemplar. And while most people would regard a life in libraries as unexciting and unromantic, Shura was fond of living his life as fully as his capacious mind would allow. After he had recovered from a cardiac arrest in the foyer of the Harvard Faculty Club, he used to bring his students to the very spot where he had temporarily died. "You know, there was nothing. No beautiful colors. No castles. No bright lights. Nothing. So, if there are things you want to say and do, don't wait. Say them and do them. You won't get the opportunity after you're dead." During decades devoted to learning, this comprehensive biography makes plain, Gerschenkron drove himself to a life which for all of its time in an ivory tower was full of exuberance and courage.

Growing up Nicholas Dawidoff had a talkative and demonstrative larger-than-life maternal grandfather who had lived in, to paraphrase the Chinese curse, interesting times: his home town Odessa during the Russian revolution and Vienna (where he had to start over, learning German as a student) during the rise of Nazism. Alexander Gerschenkron (called Shura) had married a fellow student, Erica Matschnigg, in Vienna, whom he would deem "perfect," and who was his lifelong intellectual sparring partner. To save their lives they emigrated to the US. After a time Shura found work at UC Berkeley, The Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC, and then at his favorite place ever: Harvard. In addition this brilliant and cultured grandfather was kind and funny, educated, eccentric, and more than willing to act as a sort of a dad for his grandson, whose own father was mentally ill.

The one thing, though that Gerschenkron couldn't, or wouldn't, provide for family, friends, or colleagues - or his beloved and loving grandson - was so much as a shred of concrete information about his childhood, his youth, and anything remotely resembling his feelings. No one got into his inner life, and those who tried (and there were many) learned that it was at all times off-limits. So this book is a memoir but also a work of informed conjecture and detection.

Dawidoff, an insightful man and a compassionate reporter, draws a careful and reasoned portrait, "a biographical memoir, a work of reconstruction" that is a pleasure to read. The "dismal science," economics, has never seemed so vitally important and downright interesting as it does in this book.

Gerschenkron was hyperactive; he gave up reading the newspaper in middle age, citing the number of books he had yet to read and reasoning that the time the papers took from this was objectionable. He loved to argue and to win, but he was courtly, too. He practiced what he called "French manners," combining recognizable rules of European etiquette with extreme chivalry. He could be exasperating, but he was generous and possessed astonishing depth and breadth of knowledge (in many areas, not just economics) which he more than willingly shared with the world. Gerschenkron developed theories of economic behavior that are classics, now, and some which were of great importance to US policymakers' understanding of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and of developing nations' economic behavior. He was a prolific essayist and loved literature. Rather than read translations, he taught himself entire languages. He worked out chess problems without a chessboard. He was a character, and became something of a curmudgeon in later life.

Gerschenkron was also fiercely loyal to certain things - countries, colleagues, ideas, people, and the most ordinary stuff of his life. Dawidoff takes pleasure in this information, and I did, too Of Shura he writes. "[He] had a party (the Democrats); a team (the Red Sox); a player (Ted Williams); a board game (chess); a breed of dog (Labrador retriever); a flower (pink rose); a lower body haberdasher (he sent to a Vienna tennis shop for white linen trousers); an upper body haberdasher (he ordered his wool plaid lumber jackets and matching caps from a hunting supply outfit in Maine); a brandy; a chocolate bar; an aspirin; a bullet; a pencil; a shaving soap; a foreign bookstore; a domestic bookstore; a barber; a newsstand (he would go miles out of his way to buy his periodicals from Sheldon Cohen at Out of Town News); and a weekly news magazine (L'Espresso)." And of course he had a school, Harvard, which he loved beyond all measure. Gerschenkron's calculus was simple: the US was the best nation on earth, and Harvard its best school. He thrived there. Dawidoff claims that Harvard "made his personality possible."

Gerschenkron dominated people and gatherings and enjoyed contact, but also required and demanded great blocks of solitude. Sometimes he hurt those he loved. He insisted that his young daughter practice her flute when he wasn't at home, because the sound annoyed him. He disappointed his daughters often and had some stormy relations with friends and colleagues.

There's hardly a dull moment in this account of a life and the many lives that Gerschenkron touched, and Dawidoff has provided enough interesting tangential information to serve as jumping-off points for a lot more reading and inquiry.

There are Source Notes and Acknowledgements. The books lacks an index, which is a real shortcoming. There are hundreds of interesting and important people, places, and works of art and scholarship in this book and its publisher ought to have splurged on something so essential as a good index. Gerschenkron (a lover of notes, acknowledgements, appendices, and indices) would agree.

This is an excellent introduction not only to the greek alphabet but to the origin and meaning of many english words as well. The authors start each chapter with a letter from the greek alphabet. They then demonstrate how many words from english are derived from those greek words beginning with that letter. It is a fascinating and intriguing foray into the world of word meanings and origins.

The army of Alexander would seem to be an excellent topic for a book. Yet, this is the only one in existence that documents colours as well as weapons/tactics etc. The art is quite superb. A unique book, delving into an area that despeartely needs more researchers!

"A-B-C Et Cetera" is funny and entertaining while at the same time informative and enlightening. I use this book in my classroom all the time, and my Latin students love it. The Humez Brothers have a knack for making a "once upon a time" anecdote about Rome an etymological and educational challenge!

This book gives the history of latin words, letter by letter. How they came to be and how the meaning of words have changed over the years enlightens the reader. Entertaining reading as well as informative. If you are at all interested in word origins, this is the book for you.

An absolutely excellent bunch of photographs never before seen in any other book about the Last Imperial Family; they're on their yacht, at the beloved palace Livadia, at the front... everywhere. Quite a few dates are off and there are some misidentifications with Nicholas and Alexandra's daughters (rather typical, sadly enough), but it's still excellent. I recommend this to ANYONE interested in the Romanovs, even slightly. It even throws in Grabbe's views on Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children.

Having just finished reading it for the third time, I believe that Cancer Ward is a very fine novel, rich at many levels: in its depiction of Soviet provincial society in 1955, a poor society just emerging from Stalinism; in its portrayal of many separate characters (doctors, nurses, patients, hospital workers) in that society, many of whose lives have been permanently damaged by the terror and the GULAG, but in different ways; and, as I know from personal experience, in its depiction of the isolated world of the cancer patient, from which the rest of society is seen dimly, as though through dirty glass. In spite of all medical progress, the basics of this world have not changed much in 50 years: the core treatments are still surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and the side effects both long and short term can still be brutal.

The ending of the book will disappoint those who want a happy ending, or just an ending with all the loose ends tied up. In real life, though, loose ends usually stay loose. My thought is that Solzhenitshyn intended the reader to understand that for the characters and the society who are so damaged by the past there can be no happy endings; the best they can hope for is to continue from day to day, grasping at whatever happiness briefly comes their way.

Cancer Ward is often overshadowed by its predecessor, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and its successor, the immense memoir, The Gulag Archipelago. While the worldly impact of those two works is perhaps greater, the aesthetic power of Cancer Ward is stronger than both of those works. The story is poignant and powerful, reaching out and probing deeply into the essential questions that are never answered by not only Soviet society, but western culture as a whole. The religious message that emerges is stunning and unique, recalling the works of Dostoyevsky. Overall, this is an excellent book, and any reader who enjoyed One Day or Gulag will be blown away by this work.

Those were the words that Dorothy used to describe Oz after waking up in the bosom of her family. The same intense feeling came over me while reading this book, a task that spanned several years, as I often put it aside for other things, always returning, drawn by the power of the author's prose in opening his world to us. The realness of Solzhenitsyn's worlds makes him perhaps the most accessible Russian novelist. As he described the village where Kostoglotov, the protagonist, lived, or in recounting how Ruasov, the villian/fellow victim ruined lives while justifying his actions, a vivid portrait fills the reader's imagination.
The human struggle to find hope and beauty in the most tragic of settings is what this novel evokes so well. Soviet medicine, cancer, a Zek fresh from the Gulag, and in a twilight turned dawn, Solzhenitsyn finds for his semi-autobiographical protagonist happiness, not only in winning victories against a malignant tumor, but in thoughts of perhaps one more summer to live, with nights sleeping under the stars, of three beech trees that stand like ancient guardians of an otherwise empty steppe horizon, a dog that shared his life there, and of a young nurse and spinster doctor, both of whom he hoped at times to love.
The picture one often got (accurately) of the Soviet Union was of greyness, gloom, uniform drabnes, and of a totalitarian police state. This book serves to remind the reader that, despite such circumstances, even desparately sick human being might still seek, and find, happiness in his own, private world. Along with that, Solzhenitsyn never lets us forget the utter corruption of the Soviet state, often in the person of Ruasov, an ailing bureaucrat who has managed to turn personnel management into an exquisite art form, as an instrument of psychological torture, slowly administered.
Of all Solzehenitsyn's works, this is my favorite. The people one encounters are vividly real, and the ending isn't what one would think (or hope), but is fitting, nonetheless.
-Lloyd A. Conway

This novel takes real history and blends it almost seamlessly with creative fiction, treating the family with fairness and respect in the process. Some of the non-historical premises are not terribly believable if you know the real facts involved, and the story sometimes sinks into overdrama, but that doesn't detract from the fun. Reality aside, the story works.

If you consider yourself in love with Nicholas II's family, you'll probably very much enjoy it. If you like historical fantasy, you may enjoy it. If you are wedded to reality at all costs, you will probably be bothered.

The KITCHEN BOY is rather like those movies based on novels. If you've read the book and the movie is too faithful to the novel, the movie version is usually a disappointment. If you've read Robert K. Massie's THE ROMANOVS, THE FINAL CHAPTER, you're already familiar with what happened in the basement of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg where the Bolsheviks riddled the family with bullets, so that part of the story is anticlimactic.
The story picks up speed afterwards, however. Romanov fanatics disagree on what happened when Yurovsky and his cohorts set off to bury the bodies. Yurovsky said he burned two of the bodies, but forensic scientists maintain it would have been impossible for him to build a fire hot enough to destroy all of the bones. Over seventy years later, when what was left of the bodies was found, Maria and Alexei (The Heir) are missing. Did they survive? Author Robert Alexander uses this mystery to full effect.
Alexander (Mystery writer R.D. Zimmerman) has spent nearly thirty years in Russia. He knows the language and is able to liberally sprinkle the text with realistic dialogue. He has chosen as his narrator, Mikhail Semyonov, a millionaire living in Lake Forest, Illinois, who is making a tape for his granddaughter Kate, telling her about those final days in the Ipatiev house, where he worked as a kitchen boy. The Bolsheviks had murdered the seven Romanovs, their doctor, their maid, the cook, and the footman, even Jimmy, the little dog, but they let Leonka, the kitchen boy, go just hours before the slaughter. He ostensibly follows the truck as it heads for the Four Brothers Mine where Yurovsky planned to bury his victims. It's raining out and the road is muddy; two bodies fall off of the truck and now we have some suspense. Most accounts of the execution in the basement maintain that bullets bounced off of the jewels the girls had secreted in their corsets and the girls were hard to kill. With the smoke and the confusion it would have been possible for one of the girls to survive. That's how Anna Anderson was able to pass herself off as Anastasia all those years.
Alexander (Zimmerman) switches gears toward the end, after the grandfather's death, when he has the Kate go to Russia, to present the jewels her father smuggled out of Russia to the Hermitage Museum. Kate becomes the viewpoint character and she's a lot smarter than her grandfather gave her credit for being. This is where Alexander pulls off a twist that makes the story well worth reading. Hint, Kate's son is a hemophiliac.

Reviewer: Deborah Kaplan from Copenhagen Denmark
I loved this book. It combines the best of the historical novel, non-fiction and the suspense story - I couldn't put it down. Alexander clearly has a masterful grasp of Russian history, and he is able to make the reader care about the destiny of the last Tsar and his family, without in any way apologizing for the grave mistakes they made. This is one of those books that broadens your horizons and that you think about for a long time after finishing it.