Jane's Reviews > Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

Where I got the book: ARC from LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program

A good biography needs to be chunky, informative and as exciting as a novel. Massie does well on all three counts. Catherine The Great is a lively account of both Catherine's life and the slice of European and Russian history into which she was born, and I greatly enjoyed it.

Catherine, I learned, began life as a princess in an obscure German minor royal household. By the time she died, she had achieved great things for her vast Russian empire, introducing a much higher level of education and artistic achievement and furthering the social and political ideas of the Enlightenment (although, terrified by the French Revolution, she eventually reined back some of the freedoms she had encouraged). Even the lovers for which she was famed were sometimes given opportunities to serve their country in admirable ways (and when you read about her marriage, you understand the lovers).

I knew very little about Russian history, but by the time I finished this biography I felt I had a reasonable grasp of the period, aided by Massie's habit of reminding the reader who a character is in a brief sentence, every time we encounter him or her after an absence. Some may find that annoying--and sometimes I did--but for the general reader, it's helpful.

Less helpful, I found, was Massie's arrangement of his material into topical, rather than chronological, chapters. I did understand why he would want to do this; when you're describing the life of a head of state it's inevitably mixed up with the history of the time, and history has its themes. Still, it was disconcerting to have a character die in one chapter and then suddenly be alive again in the next.

There was also the chapter on the French Revolution, which contained very little about Catherine and Russia. Still, I'll forgive it because it's one of the most succinct and elegantly written accounts of the Revolution and Terror that I've ever read.

Although this biography is obviously aimed at the general audience rather than historians, I did wish the publisher had waited to include the index in the ARC so that I could judge it (it's rather an important factor for me in deciding whether to buy a history book).

On the whole, very good stuff, although I'd have liked just a tad more description of costume and manners. But that might have padded a book that's already nearly 600 pages long. I ended up considerably more interested in Russia than before, and a fan of this great ruler, so I'm satisfied.