William Clarke (1)

2 1/2 stars, really, but I'm feeling generous. The book relies too much on Edvard Radzinsky for the history of the Romanovs from 1914-17; having read Radzinsky on Stalin, I regard him as suspect (too many personal axes to grind). I bought the book for a particular purpose; to gain more information on the fate of the gold shipments across the Trans-Siberian Railway from 1914 to 1917, and I discovered very little new in that area. The part I am particularly interested in gets a page and a half, and though Japan is mentioned as the repository of some of the missing millions at one point, this is not examined at all.

The book does make some good points in places related to war debts and payments for munitions (which account for many of the legends of the gold scattered around the world) and takes a lot of effort to distinguish between "Tsarist gold" and "the Tsar's gold" (strictly speaking, the term "Tsar" should not be applied as a legal term to any Russian monarch after Peter the Great, but it was in common use).

As a book, this is weird. It is set in Photina - an odd choice for electronic typesetting, and is completely unhyphenated throughout, which means word spacing varies radically throughout a page. Tricky to read. More silly misprints than I would expect, and one howler of an editorial slip: "Rasputin" for "Russian" in one place.… (mais)