PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)\"So many volumes have been written about the origins of the American Civil War that one might heave a sigh at the thought of yet another, but Larson has found a genuinely original way of telling the story – and storytelling, on the basis of serious research, is what he does well ... Lincoln’s resolute constitutionalism was never in doubt – though the key arguments about states’ rights and secession are mostly skipped over here. But as Larson’s otherwise impressive account makes clear, in the first few weeks of his presidency he could be strangely irresolute in practical matters: another ditherer sliding down the slippery slope to war.\
Christopher de Bellaigue
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The book does not pretend to be a scholarly biography, though de Bellaigue has read many sources and modern works, including ones in Turkish and Persian. Instead it offers a vivid presentation of events, reimagined as scenes and episodes, and structured on the interactions between a group of key characters. The model is more dramatic than historical and just as we watch actors performing in real time, so this book is written in a continuous present tense ... Vividness is something de Bellaigue does best. To call his writing novelistic is a plain statement of fact, not a reproach ... This author’s delight in detail goes beyond the ordinary techniques of exoticism, though one of them, list-making, may be slightly over-worked ... As a stylistic exercise this is quite unusual, and the main question it raises in the reader’s mind is about the authorial voice, which exercises its own imperial power over the story. Sometimes it lays down splendid aphorisms ... What is missing here – by choice, not inadvertently – is the real key to historical writing: a sense of uncertainty. Historians make imperfect judgements about incomplete evidence, and some of what they write about (above all, human intentions) may have been intrinsically uncertain at the time. Babinger’s hesitant suggestions about the character of Mehmed are more valuable, as history, than de Bellaigue’s fluent ventriloquizing of Süleyman. That is not to say, however, that the pleasures of this book are merely superficial ones – they are strong and genuine pleasures, but of a different, literary kind.
Janet L. Nelson
MixedThe Telegraph (UK)...although I learnt a lot from this book, I have to say that for non-medievalists...it will be a bit of a bumpy ride. The little side debates with other historians can become distracting; Latin terms come thick and fast, sometimes untranslated ... The \'big picture\' can become obscured, while some of the basic background – the social and economic systems that prevailed in Charlemagne’s domains, for example – is not really filled in ... There are photo-illustrations, family trees, and many maps (some of them puzzling, as they teem with details not mentioned in the text). Experts, I am very sure, will hail this as a major work, a summa (that habit of using untranslated Latin is catching) of historical scholarship. And general readers who stay the course will learn a huge amount, and come away with a strong sense of two things: the sheer dynamism of this exceptional man, and the sheer difficulty of working out, from such distant records, what he really felt and thought.
