by Robert K. Massie, 2011, Random House, New York

This book is extremely well-written and researched.  I felt that I really understood the woman and also gleaned a tremendous amount of Russian and European history from reading it.

While I was reading the book, I was thinking about how much better written it was than was Cleopatra, A Life, by Stacy Schiff which I read last year.  Mr. Massie’s sentences were well constructed using very simple structure while Ms. Schiff seemed to stick various phrases in odd places in her sentences.  In addition, Mr. Massie let the story tell itself while Ms. Schiff tried to interject her own odd sense of humor into the story at every opportunity she had.  The result is that reading Catherine made me dislike Cleopatra even more than I had previously.

The persons in the book were sometimes a bit difficult to track due to the complexity of the relationships, but the author manages to keep the reader on track and make it interesting.  The amount of detail about Catherine’s various affairs (there were twelve of them), also made it a bit overwhelming.  Nevertheless, the book is well worth the effort to read.