The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D. / James Reston, Jr. concludes that there was one, spanning about 40 years prior to the year 1000 A.D. and constituting the triumph of Christian forces over the Vikings of Scandinavia, the Moors of Spain and the Magyars of eastern Europe. The stories Reston tells are emotional and enchanting, animated by wonderful characters such as: queen Sigrid the Strong-Minded and Gerbert the brilliant, pope of the millenium, and his boy emperor, Otto III. Legend and history co-mingle in a grand canvans. I particularly remember the glory that was Cordoba, the struggles of Germanic Roman Emperors with Byzantium to aquire brides born to the purple, and the great clash of Christianized Olaf and the last great pagan fleet of Sigrid and her lover. The prominence of women in the tale surprised me: vampire Queens of Rome, Cordoba slave girls with curious power over their masters, Sigrid, and more than one Theophano but especially the one who reigned for a decade while her son Otto III matured. Reston's book gave the period a solid feel for me. As a personal sidebar, I was amused to recognize some of Guy Gavriel Kay's themes from the "Lions of Al-Rassan" in the story of Al Monsoor. As always, of course, Kay picks his incidents and combines them in new formulas merely inspired by the history they seem to be based on.
Sandra Gulland's first person narrative of Josephine Bonaparte's early life is a delight. She makes you believe this is history without bogging down in explanations -- even if she has to resort to a footnote now and then! That's talent. And courage. I've never read a better account of how people both weathered and were snuffed out by the Terror: part of the new regime one day and awaiting execution the next. But for all the intensity of the drama, Rose Beauharnais (later Josephine B.) is candid and matter of fact about her sorrows. A very good read. Probably its best success, technically, is how skillfully the author makes it possible for us to like Rose despite her association with people who have a lot of blood on their hands, by means of her limited view and the danger that threatens her. A sense of reality and period unfolds in details like her bad teeth, and the ambiguity of her unhappy marriage that makes the death of her husband both tragedy and relief.