GRIGORI RASPUTIN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History










Published in 2017 by Hourly History.

I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The Russian Revolution one of those areas for me. I know a lot more than most people, but I can clearly see the that there is a lot that I don't know.

Rasputin is, of course, an iconic, almost mythical personality of the Russian Revolution. This series specializes in short biographies and histories that will take the average reader about an hour to read. There are plenty of people and historic events that I would like to know a little more about, but not necessarily commit to reading a 500 page biography or history. 

Rasputin is one of those people for me - interesting but not really worth that much of an investment of my time.

I've read a few biographies from Hourly History and, without a doubt, this was the best of the lot so far. Rasputin was an immensely interesting personality and this short biography did a very solid job of balancing the early part of his life with his more famous later years. 

I rate this short e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GRIGORI RASPUTIN: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

STAR TREK PICARD: NO MAN'S LAND: AN ORIGINAL AUDIO DRAMA (audiobook) by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

Image
Published by Simon and Schuster Audio Originals in 2022. Performed by a full cast, including Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd. Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Set immediately after the Star Trek streaming show Picard: Season One , the audiobook  No Man's Land is an adventure featuring the characters Seven of Nine and Raffi.  With the collapse of the Romulan Empire comes the rise of local Romulan warlords who are trying to assert their control over the Romulan territory and, just as important, lay claim to the Romulan brand.  A Romulan who has taken the title Emperor is conquering/leveling various planets in an attempt to establish himself as the successor to the Romulan Empire. It looks he is heading towards a planet that is secretly holding a massive collection of written materials, museum pieces, and other cultural relics of the collapsed Romulan Empire.  There is a mad scramble to remove the relics, led by an ancient, kindly professor of unknown or...
Read more

SOLDIER BOY by Michael Shaara

Image
  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called Timescape . Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. Soldier Boy is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they vary in qu...
Read more

The Secret Scroll by Ronald Cutler

Image
Not good, not bad Published in 2008 by Beaufort Books. Some have reviewed The Secret Scroll very harshly. I am unwilling to do this, despite my opinion that this is not really a good book. I give it 3 Stars. As I told someone else, it is neither drek nor a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's kinda like watching an episode of Matlock - it beats watching nothing but it sure isn't To Kill A Mockingbird , despite being set in the south and having courtroom drama. Positives: -The plot moves along at a quick pace. -Lots of action. -The bad guys are truly bad. -a love story. -I was interested in seeing where Cutler was going with his depictions of Jesus and Paul. -The short (2-5 pages) chapter style makes it an easy book to put down and pick up again. Negatives: -It is set around a scroll that is discovered by an American archaeologist that is supposedly written by Jesus of Nazareth. Cutler makes the text of such a scroll accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with ancie...
Read more

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

Image
  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was ...
Read more

THE HINDENBURG DISASTER: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in July of 2025 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in little histories that take about an hour to read. For me, an hour of reading about the Hindenburg is about right.  The Hindenburg Disaster is a short history that details the beginnings of zeppelins/blimps through the tragedy of the complete destruction of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in just 32 seconds in New Jersey in 1937.  Germany was a focal point for building blimps/zeppelins during World War I and before World War II. The blimps went from being potential military airships to being experimental ways to travel. One has to remember that airplanes were even more experimental way to travel. Any sort of air travel was going to be prohibitively expensive - only the richest of the rich could afford it. Blimps/zeppelins offered a stately, luxurious ride - planes were seen as a noisy and cramped and inferior alternative. This short history chronicles the struggles of the blimp/zeppelin industry during t...
Read more

FINDING JESUS: FAITH. FACT. FORGERY: SIX HOLY OBJECTS that TELL the REMARKABLE STORY of the GOSPELS by David Gibson and Michael McKinley

Image
Published in 2015 by MacMillan Audio. Read by Peter Larkin. Duration: 7 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Finding Jesus is not a deep book theologically, but it does take a balanced look at 6 things that are associated with Jesus and a few related topics and is respectful of the faithful while doing its exploration. If you are expecting a book that is out to burst religious bubbles, this is not your book. The topics are: 1) John the Baptist. Who was he? Is he in the historical record? Are the relics of John the Baptist in scattered across Europe actually him? The James Ossuary. 2) James, the brother of Jesus. Who was he? Was he Jesus' half brother through Mary or a step-brother from a previous marriage of Joseph? Is the James Ossuary (a casket to hold bones) that was discovered a few years ago real? 3) Mary Magdalene. Who was she? Was she a disciple or simply a follower of Jesus? Why is she not mentioned after the four gospels? Was she the wife of Jesus? Was she really a re...
Read more

THE EYES of the DRAGON by Stephen King

Image
Originally published in 1984. Published by Penguin Audio in 2010. Read by Bronson Pinchot. Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged The ancient kingdom of Delain is ruled by a good king, but not a great king. He is a widower with two sons and an ancient, yet seemingly ageless, magician adviser named Flagg. His oldest son is Peter - a son who shows all of the signs that he will be a great and good king in the future. His youngest son is Thomas, a young man who is a lot like his father. Thomas is very jealous of the well-deserved attention lavished upon Peter and often turns to his only friend - Flagg. Flagg is very powerful, long-lived and an omnipresent dark force in the royal palace. In reality, he is more than a mere magician, he is a malignant force that seeks to create chaos and disorder above all else. Flagg is a frequent character in Stephen King books, most notably in The Stand and The Dark Tower series. This book is his second appearance in King's work. Flagg poiso...
Read more

THE GOLEM'S VOICE (graphic novel) by David G. Klein

Image
  Published in 2015 by Now What Media, LLC Synopsis: Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice  is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps. As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother. Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew . Legend has it th...
Read more

TYRANNY, INC.: HOW PRIVATE POWER CRUSHED AMERICAN LIBERTY - AND WHAT to DO ABOUT IT (audiobook) by Sohrab Ahmari

Image
Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Sohrab Ahmari. Duration: 7 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Writing about government overreach is a common theme among conservatives like Sohrab Ahmari. In Tyranny, Inc . he switches gears and writes about overreach from the private sector instead.  He talks about predatory hedge funds that purchase reasonably healthy companies, load them with debt, and then let them die. He tells the pathetic story of the decline and fall of both Sears and K-Mart, but it's happened over and over again with multiple companies. He also talks about a number of court cases, legal rulings, new laws, and relatively new interpretations of laws that have slid the balance of societal power to private corporations. He gives tons of examples like expansive Non-Disclosure Agreements, tracking software on employee's private phones because they are forced to use them for work, and hidden clauses in multi-page employment agreements that give employer...
Read more

THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust

Image
Published by Blackstone Audio in 2008. Read by Lorna Raver. Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on. In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died. The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach.  The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifte...
Read more