A Review of ‘Peter the Great: His Life and World’
A biography that will keep you turning the pages
“I have civilized my own subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet I have not been able to civilize or to conquer myself.” — Peter the Great (from Wikiquote)
Biographies of historical figures can be hit-or-miss affairs; sometimes they are amazing, sometimes they’re a great cure for insomnia, and once a generation a dense, cinder block of a book gains new life when Lin-Manuel Miranda turns it into a hit Broadway musical. Fortunately, Robert K. Massie’s superb biography Peter the Great: His Life and World needs no historical revision and catchy showtunes to make it a gripping tale. Massie expertly takes us back to Russia in the 1600s to meet one of the most influential rulers of the past 500 years, Russian Tsar Peter the Great.
Peter the Great: His Life and World is the first volume in a four-book series on the Romanovs that includes Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. Of the four books, Massie’s biography of Catherine has been the most acclaimed, but personally I found the biography of Peter both more compelling and more readable.
