Michael Knox Beran

I poked at the other reviews of this book before writing thing and someone knocked the author’s style and I get it, but the guy is writing about murder through the lense of gothic romanticism. What, exactly, did you expect Anyways, that’s irrelevant.

I enjoyed this one. It really made me question WHY I so many of the things I enjoy are horror/thriller/murder mystery based. The last chapter’s essay on the real reason that murder no longer disturbs us, really struck a cord with me and it was completely worth wading through what, to some, might seem like unwieldy pre-Victorian prose.… (más)

Dry and occasionally boring. It wasn't awful and was a solid three stars until toward the end, when the author began insulting Mystery novels and their readers. I get it. You're an academic and your thoughts on murder during the 19th Century are intellectual and important. [/sarcasm] However, you are publishing a book on murder for the commercial market. Who the hell do you think your readers are going to be? Generally, they are going to have a lot of crossover with Mystery readers. Insulting them and their chosen genre maybe isn't the best idea.… (más)

In the space of a single decade, three leaders liberated tens of millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered forever the forms of national power:

Abraham Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the American Republic.
Tsar Alexander II broke the chains of the serfs and brought the rule of law to Russia.
Otto von Bismarck threw over the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the last of the imperial Napoleons, and united the German nation.
The three statesmen forged the empires that would dominate the twentieth century through two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Each of the three was a revolutionary, yet each consolidated a nation that differed profoundly from the others in its conceptions of liberty, power, and human destiny. Michael Knox Beran's Forge of Empires brilliantly entwines the stories of the three epochal transformations and their fateful legacies.

Telling the stories from the point of view of those who participated in the momentous events -- among them Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Chesnut and Leo Tolstoy, Napoleon III and the Empress EugÉnie -- Beran weaves a rich tapestry of high drama and human pathos. Great events often turned on the decisions of a few lone souls, and each of the three statesmen faced moments of painful doubt or denial as well as significant decisions that would redefine their nations.

With its vivid narrative and memorable portraiture, Forge of Empires sheds new light on a question of perennial importance: How are free states made, and how are they unmade? In the same decade that saw freedom's victories, one of the trinity of liberators revealed himself as an enemy to the free state, and another lost heart. What Lincoln called the "germ" of freedom, which was "to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind," came close to being annihilated in a world crisis that pitted the free state against new philosophies of terror and coercion.

Forge of Empires is a masterly story of one of history's most significant decades.… (más)