{"id":1162,"date":"2012-05-06T14:47:32","date_gmt":"2012-05-06T20:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1162"},"modified":"2015-05-31T14:23:04","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T20:23:04","slug":"catherine-the-great-portrait-of-a-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1162","title":{"rendered":"Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Robert K. Massie, 2011, Random House, New York<\/p>\n<p>This book is extremely well-written and researched.\u00c2\u00a0 I felt that I really understood the woman and also gleaned a tremendous amount of Russian and European history from reading it.<\/p>\n<p>While I was reading the book, I was thinking about how much better written it was than was <em>Cleopatra, A Life, <\/em>by Stacy Schiff which I read last year.\u00c2\u00a0 Mr. Massie&#8217;s sentences were well constructed using very simple structure while Ms. Schiff seemed to stick various phrases in odd places in her sentences.\u00c2\u00a0 In addition, Mr. Massie let the story tell itself while Ms. Schiff tried to interject her own odd sense of humor into the story at every\u00c2\u00a0opportunity she had.\u00c2\u00a0 The result is that reading <em>Catherine<\/em> made me dislike <em>Cleopatra<\/em> even more than I had previously.<\/p>\n<p>The persons in the book were sometimes a bit difficult to track due to the complexity of the relationships, but\u00c2\u00a0the author\u00c2\u00a0manages to keep the reader on track and make it interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 The amount of detail about Catherine&#8217;s various affairs (there were twelve of them), also made it a bit overwhelming.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless, the book is well worth the effort to read.\u00c2\u00a0<img decoding=\"async\" title=\"four stars\" src=\"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/wp-includes\/images\/stars-4-0.gif\" alt=\"four stars\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Robert K. Massie, 2011, Random House, New York This book is extremely well-written and researched.\u00c2\u00a0 I felt that I really understood the woman and also gleaned a tremendous amount of Russian and European history from reading it. While I <span class=\"excerpt-dots\">&hellip;<\/span> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1162\"><span class=\"more-msg\">Continue reading &rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[17,20,16],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-biography","tag-history","tag-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1786,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions\/1786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}