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The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come.
In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation; from the ordinary soldiers and nurses on the battlefields to the women and children in towns under siege..
Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force whose depiction of ethnic cleansing and the West's relations with the Muslim world resonates with contemporary overtones. At once a rigorous, original study and a sweeping, panoramic narrative, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world..
"Starred Review. Fascinating...Narrative history at its best, with patient unfolding of events unknown and forgotten--but that have consequences even today. A thoroughly impressive book." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. A lucid, thoroughly satisfying, definitive history." - Publishers Weekly
"A wonderful subject, on every level, and with Orlando Figes it has found the historian worthy of its width and depth." - Norman Stone, Standpoint
"Figes' new work will remind readers of his gifts, keen judgment and mastery of sources." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"This is the only book on the Crimean War anyone could need. It is lucid, well-written, alive and sensitive. Above all, it tells us why this neglected conflict and its forgotten victims deserve our remembrance." - The Independent (UK)
"Figes is a first-class historian... an excellent guide to the vagaries of the battlefield and the suffering of the ordinary soldiers... and the extent to which this was a religious war." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"A fine, stirring account, expertly balancing analysis... with an impressive narrative across the vast panoramic sweep of the war." - Financial Times (UK)
"Excellent... I could not help but marvel at the many parallels with the present." - The Spectator (UK)
"A stellar historian. As ever, Figes mixes strong narrative pace, a grand canvas and compelling ideas about current geopolitical tensions." - The Observer (UK)
"A complex tale, told vividly by Figes." - The Economist (UK)
This information about The Crimean War was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a Double-Starred First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He is the author of many books on Russian history, including A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which in 1997 received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002) was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. His other books include The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007), Crimea: The Last Crusade (2010) and Just Send Me Word...
... Full Biography
Link to Orlando Figes's Website
Name Pronunciation
Orlando Figes: FY-jez
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