Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have read four biographies of Bismarck and consider him one of the two or three most fascinating and important people in the 19th century--and almost as significant in the 20th century insofar as he created several of the mechanisms that would ultimately produce the two world wars. I was therefore very excited to see the appearance of this volume and the very good early reviews it received. Reading the thing, however, has brought real disappointment. The book is not devoid of insights; Steinberg does an unusually good job, for instance, explaining why Bismarck was so focused on securing the German hinterland as a hedge against Austrian intrigue and in showing how he turned the working classes against the middle-class liberal movement. But one must read a lot of pages to find such gems, considerably more than in other biographies of great statesmen and women. There is also the problem Kissinger noted: Steinberg's obvious contempt for Bismarck, which colors his treatment of the subject. Many readers would doubtless reach the same conclusion, but surely they should be given the opportunity to do so from an independent examination of the evidence rather than being told constantly what to think. Stylistically, the book is turgid. Steinberg includes scores of long quotations from other books--often two or three paragraph-length excerpts on a single page--and many of these don't really support his argument. The reader thus finds himself saying, "okay, but why is this quotation here at all?" and then going back to rediscover the point that the author was previously trying to make. For a few pages midway through the book I tried in frustration to skip the long quotations and follow only Steinberg's actual text in the hope of finding a more coherent thread. But there was none; the author had simply lost his narrative direction, a problem that occurs several times. The book also includes bizarre digressions. At one point, for instance, he chases the wild goose of Ferdinand Lassalle (the leader of the Prussian working classes) and his love affairs, then digresses further into Lassalle's visit to Karl Marx's residence and the extent to which Marx's wife wanted to impress the visitor. Steinberg then asks "does one catch the whiff of jealousy in Marx's attitude to Lassalle?" Well, sure, but what does all of this have to do with Bismarck? Then there is Steinberg's annoying habit of injecting himself into the narrative. "My reading of the sources suggests . . .," "my hunch is that . . .," etc., are phrases that needlessly shift attention away from the subject and to the author. Once or twice may be tolerable, but to do this dozens of times is remarkably self-indulgent. I gave Steinberg two stars because of his occasional insights. I would have loved to give him five, but this biography is too difficult to read given the limited contribution it makes to the existing literature.