Former People

Former People:The Final Days of The Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith was the next book on our list.  This one was unanimous in our choice of next book to read.  The synapsis sounded like a fascinating Downton Abbey of the russian revolution.  Sadly it did not live up to any of its expectations and only one of our group members actually read the whole thing!  So sad.  The amount of detail and research the author put into this was wasted on just that.  The detail was so detailed that the book was just bogged down in historical facts and hard to pronounce people and places.  we all agreed that the author, with all his information, could have easily created a profile of 2 or 3 families and created a story line on what we had all hoped.  Instead it was a dark russian history lesson with people we just couldn't care for.  We met this night in Klahanie at Hop Jack's.  A bar and grill style chain that has great fish tacos!  We did have some discussion on this latest book.  We tried to place ourselves, typical suburban well to do family women, in comparison with the social upperclass women and families of 1900's Russia.  Tragedies occurring around them but still staying together a persevering.  Would we do this?  How would we survive?  How did they survive?  Could we do the same?  We also discussed similarities to other tragic events in history.  The holocaust, the Irish famine, the Germans from Russia.  In closing we were interested in learning more about an unknown subject but were so highly disappointed in this book that we barely made it half way through.  It is now just a bitter memory....