I bought this book a few weeks ago. Coincidentally, while going through the pictures on my phone I saw that I had taken a photo of it many months ago with the intention to buy it at some point because it looked interesting. I guess I decided on purchasing it on this most recent trip because somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered that I was intrigued a long time ago.
History books can be a little boring for me at times, especially if they are written in a manner that reminds me of high school textbooks. I was never fond of history in school, which is the opposite of how I feel about reading the subject now. I love European history, being that it is laughable when you read about all the terribly planned arranged marriages between men and women who do not suit each other, scandalous when you consider the sheer number of unions made between first cousins, and occasionally between uncles and their nieces, and despicable regarding the things that monarchs and persons in other positions of power would do when they held a grudge. It’s dramatic, and I love it. This book detailed the entire history of the Habsburg family, from the very first of them to come into power to the end of the dynasty in the early 1900s. My favorite chapter, or one of the ones I enjoyed the most, was chapter seventeen which detailed some of Maria Theresa’s rule as empress. Overall, the book is incredibly informative going into who ruled, the accumulation and loss of territory over the centuries, and the politics, art, science, religion, and other important particulars of the times. I also found an amazing woman online who does a series of five videos on the history of the Holy Roman Empire, if you would rather watch a video over reading a book. I will put a link to the first video in her series at the bottom of the post. Her channel name is History Tea Time with Lindsay Holiday and she has a ton of videos. She has a really clear, pleasant voice, and this series has great visualizations with maps, territory lines, portraits, and depictions of art.
There is one detail that made me really enamored of this book. It may seem like a silly little thing but it was a big deal for me. A lot of history books will include a section of pictures, which are usually located somewhere in the middle of the text. A lot of those pictures are placed right in the middle of a chapter, which I have always found annoying as it interrupts the reading. They also are usually placed mid-sentence, which means you either have to go back and restart the sentence after you look at all the pictures or you have to find the end of the pictures and finish reading the sentence before viewing. I very much appreciated that the pictures in this book were placed right at the end of a chapter.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 