I can never seen to get to the end of World War I with these Central European history books. I had to return this one through ILL before I finished it, but I'm planning on getting a card at a local university library and will have to borrow it again.

This is an amazingly readable history of the Habsburgs and the world they created (sometimes quite by accident). "Habsburgs" does not sound like a promising topic for any book, but Winder is more interested in social and cultural history than military conflict and interpersonal drama. The book that results is part chatty history, part travelogue of his wanderings across Europe. Sometimes Winder's editorializing is a little much, but for the most part he's an entertaining narrator.

I can now say that European history makes some kind of sense to me—the rise of, for instance, the Swedish Empire now feels inevitable rather than mildly surprising. ( )

Mr. Winder is a breezy writer, trending to the joky, but he does communicate. His work isreplete with put-downs and racial slurs, yet it conveys the confusing ground upon any student of Central Europe must try to find a footing. The maps are frequent, and of considerable value. The bibliography is of interest here, as he leaves a great many ways into deeper research indicated. So, enjoy this effort, but realise it will be more often found in epigraphs than footnotes. ( )

This book didn't turn out to be what I thought. Not a bad book, but I was hoping for "a short history of the Hapsburg Empire" with some amusing anecdotes along the way. The actual history is so long, and so full of unusual place names (that keep changing every few years), and so different than what we Americans are used to in terms of this nationality or that ethnic group that I'm not sure it's even possible to write the book I was hoping to read. Winder gets kudos for including some maps but I was soon lost amid all the place names. Negative marks for including lots of odd little asides that have only a tangential relation to the story he's telling. I did learn some about the history of Central Europe. I'd be interested in hearing what some of today's Austrians think about their history as presented here. ( )

For centuries vast swathes of central and southern Europe was ruled by a single family, the Habsbergs. They overcame all attempts by rivals to conquer them, until the end of the Great War when the devastation caused by that event was the final straw.

In this substantial book, Winder tells the history of this odd family, and more importantly the places that they ruled. It is packed full of fascinating stories and strange tales of this eccentric family and their lands. There is way too much to pack into this short review, but it is a fascinating book, written with wit and humour too. Well worth reading. ( )

All those Philips and Ferdinands and Franzes.

Winder’s idiosyncratic account of the rise and fall of the Habsburg Dynasty is great good fun, wry, informal, erudite. By a combination of accident, luck and ruthlessness, the Habsburgs held sway in Central Europe from the Middle Ages to WWI. They were at center stage for the creation of a Spanish empire in the Americas, the Italian wars that ended the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent that was finally checked at the Battle of Lepanto, the Thirty Years War, Napoleon’s destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, the Revolutions of 1848 and the Balkan Wars. All these events look and feel different when considered from the Habsburg (and Winder’s) perspective.

Winder doesn’t really spend a lot of time on the battles and high politics that a more conventional history might emphasize; he is more interested in the eccentric, odd and peculiar bits that enliven our view of the past. Through a tour of castles, chapels, crypts, fortresses, hunting lodges, armories and provincial museums in obscure villages we encounter mummies, bear moats, devil-dolls, bezoars and glyptics. The Habsburgs put great stock in the cultic power of imperial heirlooms (a unicorn horn, the Holy Grail) and regalia (red samite gloves, gold scabbards, an imperial mantle decorated in Arabic script) and ceremony. We hear of the dodo acquired by Rudolph II from the Fuggers’ warehouse of exotic beasts in Antwerp; the ‘demented enthusiasms’ of Athanasius Kircher (a tower built to reach the moon would require 374,731,250,000,000 bricks); the supernova witnessed by Tycho Brahe in Prague in 1604; Ludwig Viktor, the transvestite uncle of Franz Ferdinand who outlived the Dynasty. The Habsburgs were patrons of great painters and composers—Titian, Bosch, Rubens, Arcimboldo; Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven—and some ‘engagingly semi-competent’ ones as well. Maximilian I’s advantage over all subsequent Holy Roman Emperors, according to Winder, was that his portrait was painted by Dürer.

Winder uses the ‘teetering plausibility’ of a basilisk preserved in a glass jar at the Vienna Museum of Natural History (actually a ray from some far-away port, cut, folded and sewn to form legs, wings and horns) to make a keen point about how difficult it is for humans of the present to really make sense of humans from the past. Not for Winder the pop-historian fallacy that they were just like us! The scientific and magical preoccupations of medieval and early modern Europe were ‘drawn from intellectual streams so rich, various and contradictory,’ writes Winder, that we can read and study and ponder but never fully grasp the assumptions and motivations that shaped their mental worlds. Winder is constantly making us aware that the history of Central Europe and the Habsburgs means something different to us than it did to the people who lived through it.

At the end of WWI, patches of the Austrian Tyrol were handed over to Italy. Outside the town of Bolzano, in a region dominated by German-speakers, Winder comes across a castle—

In Italian it is called Castel Roncolo, which implies maidens in gauzy outfits skipping about to tambourines and lutes with weedy youths in coloured tights looking on. In German it is called Schloß Runkelstein, which implies a brandy-deranged old soldier-baron with a purple face and leg-iron lurching around darkened dank corridors, beating a servant to death with his crutch. Seeing the two names everywhere side by side is deeply confusing, like having one eye always out of focus. ( )