Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World

by Simon Sebag Montefiore Narrated by Steve West

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanovs-and one of our pre-eminent historians and a prizewinning writer-comes an inspiring, horrifying, and accessible collection of short, entertaining, and vivid life stories about the giant characters who have changed the course of world history.
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These titans of history-encompassing queens, empresses, and actresses, kings, sultans, and conquerors, as well as prophets, artists, courtesans, psychopaths, and explorers-lived lives of astonishing drama, courage and adventure, debauchery and slaughter, virtue and crime. The subjects range widely throughout time and geography from Buddha and Genghis Khan to Nero and Churchill; from Catherine the Great and Anne Frank to Toussaint l'Ouverture and Martin Luther King; from Mozart to Mao; from Jesus Christ and Shakespeare to Einstein and Elvis. Through these lives, Montefiore recounts the most momentous world events-from ancient times to the Crusades, the Holocaust, and the Gulf Wars.
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These are the historical figures that everyone should know and the stories we should never forget.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Entertaining and informative. Full of offbeat, fascinating detail.” —Sunday Telegraph

“These sparkling biographical essays include all the usual suspects. . . . It’s a tour of the good, the bad and the ugly.” —Mail on Sunday (U.K.)

“Compulsive reading.” —The Times (London)
 
“We do not shudder at the depths to which men and women throughout history have sunk, but experience a piquant relish . . . a book that reminds us how thin the veneer of civilisation is.” —The Times
  
“A survey of great historical figures favours villainy over goodness. . . . A compilation of short biographical profiles . . . catering to our appalled fascination with evil. Monsters outnumber heroes. Stalin, the subject of Montefiore’s superb two-volume biography, is the prototype for many of the maniacal autocrats whose rages and rampages are described here. A strutting parade of psychopathic dictators, warlords, malevolent dwarves. . . . Montefiore finds room for a few gods, one or two secular saints, American founding fathers, Lincoln and Churchill, and a smattering artists and scientists, but their achievements hardly manage to maintain the pretence of civilisation. What excites Montefiore is villainy . . . and he does this with wicked verve.” —The Observer
 
“Comprehensive, chilling and highly compelling. A first-class chronologically arranged catalogue that engages as it teaches.” —Daily Express

Kirkus Reviews

2018-07-31

An encyclopedia of "individuals who have each somehow changed the course of world events," in which murderers and criminals find prominent places.

Award-winning historian and novelist Montefiore (Red Sky at Noon, 2018, etc.)—assisted by Bew (History and Foreign Policy/King's Coll. London; Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, 2016, etc.), Frampton (Modern History/Queen Mary, Univ. of London; The Muslim Brotherhood and the West, 2018, etc.), Jones (The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors, 2017, etc.), and Renton (Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power, 2018)—has assembled a wide-ranging compendium of short biographical essays of nearly 200 men (and a few women) who "created the world we live in today." Admitting that the list is "totally subjective," Montefiore tends toward the monstrous and murderous. While many entries are predictable, including canonical philosophers and religious figures, political leaders, and too few artists and scientists, some choices may baffle readers. Why Jack the Ripper, for example, but not Thomas Edison? Why Al Capone but not Sigmund Freud? Basil II, a ruler of the Byzantine empire, impresses the author as "the ultimate hero-monster," a man with an "explosive temper" who earned the epithet "the Bulgar Slayer." Vlad the Impaler was "a murdering sadist who displayed cruelty so savage that he inspired the legend of Dracula." Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov "organized and coordinated Stalin's Great Terror, during which a million innocent victims were shot and millions more exiled to concentration camps." Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, a Soviet secret policeman, was a "psychopathic rapist and enthusiastic sadist" as well as "a perverted thug." Even when choosing figures from the arts, Montefiore tends toward the swashbuckling (Byron, Hemingway, Picasso) or tormented (Oscar Wilde, Toulouse-Lautrec). Jane Austen seems out of place in their company. Although the entries are lively and informative, the author does not make the case that all of these individuals deserve recognition among historical giants such as Galileo and Newton, Gandhi and Churchill, or even Elvis Presley.

A somewhat useful historical reference driven by an idiosyncratic definition of "titan."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169500547
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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