Massie is probably my favorite nonfiction author at this point, and rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors, period. His writing is so vivid that I felt like I knew these people. They had the complicated shadings of real people; of course they were real people, but that's a quality that doesn't often come over in historical tomes. Make no mistake, this is an epic work--at over 900 pages, this is not a light book, but it reads with the ease and rapidity of a novel. Also, like many good books, it also inspired me to read about other historical figures, some of which I'v/e heard of but know little about, some of which I'd never even heard of before.

I have two minor issues, one of which was not really the author's fault, and one that was. The one that was not Massie's fault was that there were so many people involved that it was hard to keep track of who was who, especially since some would be main characters for a few hundred pages, and then disappear for a few hundred more, only to reappear abruptly and with no re-introduction. I felt like I could have benefitted from an Agatha Christie-like cast of characters to keep them all straight.

Second, and this one was on Massie, was that he organized the book in a way that was partly chronological, but also partly topical. He would treat one subject completely, then go back and deal with other topics, even if it meant covering the same years multiple times. This made keeping tracks of event order difficult, and made it impossible to have a grasp of what was happening simultaneously, and what wasn't. That also meant that there were ominous foreshadowings or references in parts of the book that were not paid off until hundreds of pages later, which was more frustrating than suspenseful.

Also, as a side note, the book was written in 1980, and there has been no updated edition, so Massie does compare things to "today in the Soviet Union" or talk about "under communism today," which makes parts of his comparisons seem a little dated. Those sections are few in number and minor in importance, though, and have nothing to do with the overall drama of Peter's life, so they didn't really detract from the book.