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DiscountDelight - The Historian
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List Price: $25.95
Our Price: $5.95
Your Save: $ 20.00 ( 77% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Little, Brown
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780316011778
ISBN: 0316011770
Label: Little, Brown
Manufacturer: Little, Brown
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 656
Publication Date: 2005-06-14
Publisher: Little, Brown
Release Date: 2005-06-14
Studio: Little, Brown
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent book that is not a casual read
Comment: I really enjoyed reading this book because of its ability to create tension without your normal action associated with other thrillers. It reminded me of Stephen King - for example "The Stand" where even though there is not direct conflict, there is rising tension.
It was also the most interesting "history" book I have read in a while. Although a fictitious story, the information regarding Vlad Tepes life was true and very informative. This is something that one would not learn in the American school system unless they majored in European History in college.
Not only an enjoyable book, but a satisfying book to read as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Had so much to offer
Comment: This book severely lacked substance, was way too long, was too slow, and was too back & forth for my liking. It constantly switches from first person, to third person, and it's very hard to follow. I was really disappointed, as it does really sound interesting, but is just too dense.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Engaging read
Comment: I am a very picky reader and I really enjoyed this book. Too much of today's works are trite and contrived or just plain boring. This was just creepy enough to be intriguing yet it was not at all over done or gory. I loved the beautiful cities it takes you and the in-depth descriptions. The "true" aspects of the story were fascinating and the "fictional" aspects of the story captivated my attention. I wish I could find a book this interesting and enjoyable every month!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Comment: If you enjoy a good suspense novel and like history, you will love this book. Don't come looking for horror; if you do, you will be disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not your average Vampire Tale.
Comment: Kostova takes a fresh approach to the Vampire Tale. Hers is neither a Gothic Horror Story nor the Vampire as Metaphor for Sexual Desire genre of the usual Anne Rice/Stephen king model. "The Historian" is more of a mystery tale told in the form of letters being read by the nameless Heroine as she searches for her missing father.
Over the years many researchers have received a mysterious protfolio imprinted with the symbol of the Ancient Order of the Dragon, an anti Turk group of Crusaders whose most famous member was Vlad Tepes more commonly known as Dracula. Most of the Historians and Librarians who receive the Mysterious package become obscessed with Dracula and discover that the legends of his Vampire status are true.
Fear, Disappearances, and Death follow those who are foolish enough to seek the truth. As our Heroine escapes the bad guys and travels across 1970's Europe in search of her father, she reads the letters of the Historians who have come in Search of Dracula before and we are propelled across Europe from Oxford to Istanbul, to Iron Curtain Hungary and Bulgaria, to pre WWII Romania, and finally to 1970's Holland and France.
Kostova's Tale is refreshingly clean of Bloody and Gory scenes for this Genre. Most of the Terror is a sense of foreboding that is built up in the letters. There are many romantic entanglements that come about due to the Search for Vlad.
Big Disappointment: We don't really see Dracula until the end and I give the book 4 stars instead of 5 as the end to me was very anticlimaxtic.
Overall though the book may disappoint fans of Anne Rice and Stephen King, I think most people will enjoy it and like me will not be able to put it down. WARNING:Best Read with all the Lights On.
Can't wait to see the Movie!
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Editorial Reviews:
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If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also. As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union. Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling "a large family," she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. --Regina Marler
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