Thread by @davidfrum

I'm experimenting with threaded notes on books I've enjoyed recently
First was Barbara Amiel's "Friends and Enemies"; second, "Silencing the Past" by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Future items I'll hashtag #FrumReads
Amiel:

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1337857537211772930

Trouillot:

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1338683727543734272

Next up in #FrumReads Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie penguinrandomhouse.com/books/108892/c…

Relations are often testy between academic and non-academic historians. But the best qualities of each should claim respect from the other: the academic's original research and analytic rigor; the non-academic's zeal to hold the interest of the non-specialist reader. 1/x

The late Robert K. Massie fused the best qualities of academic and non-academic in his many volumes on Imperial Russia and the Anglo-German naval duel. Through the fall, I listened to audio versions of his Castles of Steel, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. #FrumReads

Massie, a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar, served in the US Navy, then worked as a journalist, until the amazing success of his "Nicholas and Alexandra" biography of the last Romanovs freed him to write full-time. 3/x

"Catherine the Great" was Massie's last book, published at age 82, his sparkling writing style undimmed to the end. But then a biographer of Catherine has a secret weapon: *her* sparkling writing in her letters and her candid and self-aware memoir of her early life. 4/x

Massie attends to all the issues that an academic must: Catherine's projects of legal reform, her expansionist foreign policy, Russia's unfree labor system. But as a non-academic, he is free to open with the subject that draws the paying customers: Catherine's love life. 5/x

In a jealous rage, one Catherine's lovers, Prince Potemkin, accused her of promiscuity. To soothe him, Catherine wrote a long letter detailing her prior sexual history. It's a sympathetic human document the span of time and social change. And of course Massie makes use of it. 6/x

But once he has the reader in the chair, Massie holds the reader in place for a sophisticated analysis of Russian social and economic history, including the brutal realities of the serf system. It's a high achievement to fuse the study of "la longue duree" with royal romance. 7/x

The personal and the social, the power and the limits of political choice, glamour and squalor - great historians, academic or not, can encompass them all. And Massie is a great historian, even though he made his career predominantly outside a university. 8/x

New technologies make new modes of communication available. It may not be necessary for future great historians also literally to be good writers. Perhaps they may be good documentarians or good podcasters or good something else yet to be invented. But however they do it ... 9/x

... their knowledge must *somehow* exit the ambit of their own skulls to be imparted to their fellow human creatures, or else what have they accomplished? Hail to one who accomplished his communicative work so splendidly. Robert K. Massie died in 2019. END #FrumReads3