Book Review: Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Pages: 640
Publisher: Vintage (Penguin Random House)
Released: October 16, 2018
Received: ARC from publisher
Rating: 4 our of 5 stars
Goodreads

I adore books like this: short chapters (2-4 pages) focused on different people throughout history in a roughly linear romp through time. Filled with facts, bite-sized enough to easily speed through a few at a time, yet also short enough not to bog down or require commitment.

Surprisingly, good versions of these types of books are fairly hard to come by. Sure, you can grab a million different "short history snippet" type books, but so many fall into one or more of the following pitfalls:

1. The author is trying too hard to be funny, usually resulting in slightly mocking writing that puts down those who tend to like history while failing to be witty enough to entertain those who don't like history.

2. The snippets are so short and the author leaves out crucial information or lumps everyone into caricatures that leaves the reader with a complete misunderstanding of people and events.

3. Overblown sensationalism.

4. Not enough meat to the chapters, so they end up making little sense unless you already know the historical figures or events.

Simon Sebag Montefiore managed to avoid all of these pitfalls. Not only that, but he also made each chapter interesting and engaging. Multiple times I'd get to a historical figure and I'd think, "I don't think I care about this person enough to bother reading their chapter," but then the "it's only 3 pages" voice would chime in and I'd give in and read the chapter. And I'd find myself fully enthralled and wanting to jump to Google and start searching for more information on the historical figure and their time period. Which, really, is what this type of book is supposed to do.

This is the first printing in the US, but was previously published in the UK. Some new chapters have been added and some chapters removed for this US version. Looking at the UK version, there may be more removed than added, but I'm not positive. I do miss some of the missing chapters and I wonder why they were slated for removal. As with all of these types of books, some of my favorites in history weren't included, whereas others I wouldn't have necessarily picked were included. Not a big deal either way. Some author bias also comes through (he asserts in no uncertain terms that Richard III did indeed murder his nephews), but, again, it's not awful.

While I tend to prefer reading about Western figures, there are a number of Middle Eastern and Asian "titans" included, which admittedly did help broaden the scope of history and put all of those European doings into a greater world context (ala "meanwhile, in China..."). 

Bottom line

Nicely done, Mr. Montefiore. Nicely done.

Now, let's work on getting a better cover, please.

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