The Rasputin File
by Edvard Radzinsky
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Book Summary Information
Author: Edvard RadzinskyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-12-04
ISBN: 0385489102
Number of pages: 526
Publisher: Anchor Books
Product features:
- Paperback in shades of brown and portrait of Rasputin
Book Reviews of The Rasputin File
Book Review: A major disappointment
Summary: 1 Stars
Radzinsky's "The Rasputin File," is a phenomenal and unmitigated disaster. What makes this book such an incredible disappointment is that the author has so much enticing material, and absolutely no cohesion, no sense of story, and even less self-control when it comes to editing.First, a reader must be willing to concede that whoever translated this book might in fact be better off selling trinkets on some ferry boat cruise on the Volga River. The book is choppy and poorly edited. If you like sentence fragments, then this should be real book to savor for all 500 pages. A good translator may have been able to smooth out some of these sentences, instead they were just left to sit and pester the reader, obfuscating any intelligible meaning. In fact, the more of these I came across, the more I tried to make sense of them. Needless to say, there's some quality time, I'll never get back.
I appreciated and enjoyed "The Last Tsar," by Radzinsky and have read at least 15 other books on Rasputin and the fall of the Romanovs. I was eager to pick this book up and see what sleuthing Radzinsky had completed. To be sure there's a lot of gold in these pages, but there is a lot of slag and ore that has to be processed. Some of the detail is just unnecessary and offers little to the reader for the time they invest reading this tome. The other bothersome thing is there is virtually no crafting of this vivid period of Russian history. Any sense of story and wonder is sucked right out of the book by constant section breaks and deep probing into insignificant characters.
Radzinsky often repeats himself, quoting and covering the ground he's already went over in an obvious attempt to hop back on the path of some kind of semblance and narrative.
A reader can pick up many new insights if they stick with it; then again, most readers can also pick up another book, too. It is only because of the new research contained here that this book is even worth any stars (in the Amazon.com rating system).
This book should only be touched by hardcore Russian history buffs or members of the Khlyst who like whipping themselves into a frenzy of ecstatic agony.
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