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Cargando... The three emperors : three cousins, three empires and the road to World War One (edición 2010)por Miranda Carter
Información de la obraGeorge, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I por Miranda Carter
   Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  dvoratreis | May 22, 2024 |   I found the narrative to be a bit jumpy, going back and forth between the three subjects in a disjointed way. The information is all there; it was just difficult to digest. There were a few factual mistakes that should've been checked by any editor worth their salt. One example is that one of the Kaiser's sons was named Eitel Friedrich. The author, within a page, named him as "Eitel Frederick" and "Friedrich Eitel", which is enormously inconsistent. You really should know the story before delving into this hefty tome. (  ) briandrewz | May 13, 2024 | Carter has obviously researched widely and accessed the cousins' correspondence with each other, highlighting the utter dullness of George and Nicholas and the strangeness of Wilhelm, and building a compelling story about how none of them were ready to lead their country at such a dangerous time in history. (  ) MiaCulpa | Apr 12, 2022 | ) Jthierer | Jan 13, 2020 |  ) kaitanya64 | Jan 3, 2017 |
 “George, Nicholas and Wilhelm” is an impressive book. Ms. Carter has clearly not bitten off more than she can chew for she — as John Updike once wrote about Günter Grass — “chews it enthusiastically before our eyes." You turn this book’s pages with interest, however, but rarely with eagerness. It’s a volume that never quite warms in your hands, packed perhaps too airlessly with what Ms. Carter describes at one point as “backstabbing, intrigue and muddle.” That phrase would have made a good alternative title.  Carter’s theme is the social and political linkage between the great royal families of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This provides gossip of a richness to raise Nigel Dempster from the tomb. ... Carter’s view of the descent towards the first world war as a family quarrel among the royal houses of Europe certainly makes entertaining reading. Her story is full of vivid quotations, such as "the House of Hanover, like ducks, produce bad parents. They trample on their young". She observes justly that all her monarchs were anachronisms, "ill-equipped by education and personality to deal with the modern world... The system within which they existed was dying, and the courts of Europe had turned from energetic centres of patronage into stagnant ponds of tradition and conservatism." ... For all the incidental colour, however, The Three Emperors falls short when she tries to put it all in focus. Carter’s first book was an excellent biography of that most cultured of traitors, Anthony Blunt. This time around, she offers a romp through the palaces of Europe in their last decades before Armageddon, but there is little here to surprise any student of modern history. In particular, she does not know enough about the rival forces, tensions and ambitions that precipitated war in 1914 to analyse them convincingly. She has shown that she is capable of writing a much better book than this one, but perhaps it should have been within a less ambitious compass. "When so markedly eccentric a nature dominates a realm there cannot but be convulsions." So commented Philipp zu Eulenburg, one of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany's few friends. His remark encapsulates the problem with autocracy, the danger of allowing a single, flawed, human being to exercise absolute, or near absolute, power. Part of Miranda Carter's argument in The Three Emperors: three cousins, three empires and the road to the First World War is that the autocratic cousins, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II (known to each other as Willy and Nicky) were not always quite as powerful as they thought they were. Nevertheless, they still exercised a lot more of the real thing than did the third cousin, King George V (or Georgie).  Carter draws masterful portraits of her subjects and tells the complicated story of Europe’s failing international relations well ... Over all, this highly readable and well-documented account is a useful addition to the huge literature on the question of why a general European war came in 1914. Carter shows how hereditary monarchies made their contribution to the disaster. It’s enough to make one a republican. In non-fiction I enjoyed Miranda Carter's The Three Emperors (Fig Tree), which takes what should have been a daunting subject – the interrelationships between the rulers of the three great European powers in the run-up to the first world war – and through sheer wit and narrative elan turns it into engaging drama. Like David Nicholls, in fact, Carter has a notable gift for characterisation – a quality just as important in a popular historian as in a novelist. PremiosDistinciones
In the years before World War I, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell their tragicomic stories. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)940.3112History and Geography Europe Europe World War I 1914-1918 Political history CausesClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.9)
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Here were three rather ordinary men -- cousins -- who ruled most of the world. Goodness me. How could Germany have put up with Wilhelm for so long? Although Nicholas was responsible for many terrible things, he is, by all accounts that I have read, on a personal level a very sympathetic character -- certainly the most sympathetic of the three cousins. He simply didn't have the intellect, the education, nor the personality to be an emperor. What endears him (at least to me) is his love for and devotion to his wife and family. He didn't like public life or socializing. He would have made a fine gentleman farmer, chopping wood and spending most of his time with his family. And he would have been far happier. George's betrayal of Nicholas -- who he claimed to love dearly -- is unforgiveable. Yup, a very interesting story.
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