Synopses & Reviews
Popular history of the finest sort . . . an excellent book worthy to rank with Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August and Alan Mooreheads Gallipoli.” The New York TimesOn June 28, 1914, in the dusty Balkan town of Sarajevo, an assassin fired two shots. In the next five minutes, as the stout middle-aged Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife bled to death, a dynastyand with it, a whole way of lifebegan to topple.
In the ages before World War I, four dynastiesthe Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanovdominated much of civilization. Outwardly different, they were at bottom somewhat alike: opulent, grandiose, suffocating in tradition, ostentatiously gilded on the surface and rotting at the core. Worse still, they were tragically out of step with the forces shaping the modern world.
The Fall of the Dynasties covers the period from 1905 to 1922, when these four ruling houses crumbled and fell, destroying old alliances and obliterating old boundaries. World War I was precipitated by their decay and their splintered baroque rubble proved to be a treacherous base for the new nations that emerged from the war. All convulsions of the last half-century,” Taylor writes, stem back to Sarajevo: the two World Wars, the Bolshevik revolution, the rise and fall of Hitler, and the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East. Millions upon millions of deaths can be traced to one or another of these upheavals; all of us who survive have been scarred at least emotionally by them.”
In this classic volume, Taylor traces the origins of the dynasties whose collapse brought the old order crashing down and the events leading to their astonishingly swift downfall.
About the Author
Edmond Taylor was born on February 13, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, but abandoned school during his freshman year for journalism. He became head of the Chicago Tribunes Paris bureau in 1933 and published several works of history in a long career as a writer. He died in 1998.