Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar
by Edvard Radzinsky
Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky chronicles the life of Alexander II, the emancipator of Russia’s serfs who, after multiple attempts on his life, was assassinated in 1881. The book is a great evocation of the turbulent times, though as the New York Times review when it came out in 2005 pointed out, a better subtitle might have been ‘The Times and Reign of the Last Great Tsar’: “Lively and brilliant, both epic and epigrammatic…Radzinsky’s Alexander is an abstraction. The floorboards never creak beneath his weight.”
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