Reviews for Rasputin

The average rating for Rasputin based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-28 00:00:00 Greg Bedaker One of the few books I have ever not finished. Terrible, convoluted writing with almost no factual account of Rasputin's life. Instead of history speaking for itself, the bias and imagination of the author took front and center.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-14 00:00:00 Shawn Samuel I think it's time to face up to the fact that I'm never going to finish it. Or if I do, it will take years. I keep finding other things to do than read it. It's not like this isn't good. It started out really, really interesting. And now it's kind of boring and I'm having trouble keeping track of who the author is referring to when he uses general pronouns. And when he uses actual names, I still don't know who he's talking about half the time. I wanted to read this because for some reason I always thought Rasputin was scary. Like, nightmare scary. But it turns out he's just super outrageous and kind of gross. He had straight-up orgies in the woods in the name of everything holy. And he had sex with hot society women (also in the name of everything holy). I'm convinced he had more sex than Hugh Jackman. Except it was gross sex, because he turned all his behavior into something spiritual, and people bought his shit. He'd sit there and give instructions to his female admirers. 'Do you think I degrade you? I don't degrade you. I purify you.' This was his basic idea. He also used the word grace , meaning that by sleeping with a man, a woman came into the grace of God. Well, that's one way to get super-religious ladies into bed, I suppose. And, oh yeah, it's sexist as fuck. But the sex was also gross because Rasputin apparently never showered. Food and dirt would be in his beard, his nails would be dirty, and he would even leave tar marks on ladies' dresses as a sort of calling card. Rasputin allegedly had magical healing powers. There's no doubt he was inexplicably charismatic, but among other so-called miracles, he supposedly healed the tsarevich's hemophilia on multiple occasions (could that kid ever NOT fall down and hurt himself? Couldn't his parents just wrap him in pillows? Jeez). It's still crazy to think that he drew so many people under his spell. Then again, they were rich. Rich people do dumb shit all the time and no one cares because they're rich. I'm interested in reading the author's take on Rasputin's death, but I don't feel like wading that far into the book. I may skip ahead to that part, or else I'll just see what Wikipedia has to say. But did he REALLY drown? DID HE? The world may never know...