Item: Danubia
Rating: 3.00
Author: pamela

by Simon Winder

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off - through luck, guile and sheer mulishness - any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere - indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them.

Simon Winder's extremely funny new book plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Danubia is full of music, piracy, religion and fighting. It is the history of a dynasty, but it is at least as much about the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in many rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna. Readers who discovered Simon Winder's genius for telling wonderful stories of middle Europe with Germania will be delighted by the eccentric and fascinating stories of the Habsburgs and their world.

Danubia was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2013.

This one was a DNF for me I'm afraid. Simon Winder is clearly passionate about his subject matter and that passion really shines through in his writing style, but I just felt that he bit of a bit more than a book of this size could chew.

Danubia is well researched and structured, but I just felt that such a huge chunk of Habsburg history was too great a topic to tackle in a single volume. The book would have been better served by focusing on smaller, more interesting parts of Habsburg history rather than trying to give such an overarching focus. I found myself getting overloaded with information and names and dates and not remembering much of it because by the time it had sunk in we'd already moved on to the next subject.

If Winder split this in to a volume of books on the same subject matter going in to more detail on each period of history and person of note, while including some of the funnier, quirkier stories that make history so enjoyable, I would certainly read them. He does have a talent for writing history in an entertaining and engaging manner. It would be nice to see what he could do with a topic or focus that doesn't cast its net so widely.

Danubia

by Simon Winder

Reviewed by pamela on Sep 29, 2014

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