<p>(or how I am using <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> to slowly accumulate the collected works of Stefan Zweig).</p>

<p>(Also, again I have selected on <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> that I <i>would</i> like to connect with the author and <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> has done nothing <b>NOTHING!</b> to make this happen and just because Zweig has been dead since 1942, that is no excuse. <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a>, you put that option to connect to dead people, then I am expecting you to follow through.) </p>

<p>(Also, as per the last time I wrote about <a href="http://www.reluctantm.com/?p=6149">Stefan Zweig</a>, I must mention the sheer beauty in futility of his death: likely killing himself in Brazil in 1942, in part as a rebuke, and in part as desperation, against the Nazis. It seems like a gorgeously fictitious way to die.)</p>

<p>Yay! More Zweig (which if you say in a very poor German accent, sounds a lot like <i>swag</i>, which is what getting another Stefan Zweig book to read is like: glorious, unearned, luxurious swag). Five short essays/stories on points in history where fate or people or I don't really know -- the collection starts with Zweig dribbling some <a href="http://www.reluctantm.com/?p=913">Tolstoi spew</a> to elucidate something about history and importance or people, I don't know. It read like a twelve year old with a thesaurus trying to pad out an essay. I even went back after I read the rest of the book to try and make sense of it and nope. And I was like "Zweig -- why are you doing this to me?" But thankfully, the spew is like two pages and then we get right into the meat and reading Zweig is like a blanket on a bed next to a fire and it's just so easy to slip on in there and read about history that I forgive your Tolstoi-spew Zweig. I still don't understand it, but I forgive it, because I got to spend yesterday evening reading Zweig in my bed and it was wondrous.</p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/18720990/book/153007915">Triumph and Disaster</a> by Stefan Zweig went on sale November 14, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

This is entertaining, well -researched, and I found the format refreshing, great little bits of history for someone who wants to read small amounts a a time, but well researched enough to show depth.

Stefan Zweig was an unparalleled genius. This short book of his is packed with beautiful writing and brilliant observations. The opening piece about Napoleon and the piece about Robert Scott are incredibly compelling. The Fall of Constantinople is rendered so vividly, you almost feel like you were there.

Thank you Net Galley. Although the book is not always factually correct, it is an interesting read. The opportunity to read Mr. Zweig is always welcome. Worth reading.

According to the Foreword of Stefan Zweig’s ‘Triumph and Disaster’ his miniature historical essays examine key moments which can be said to have changed the course of History.

The five collected here relate to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo (1815); Scott’s failure to beat Amundsen to the South Pole (1912); Sultan Mahomet’s defeat of Byzantium (1453); Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station (1917); and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), although it’s hard to see what substantial difference it made whether the first flag to fly at the South Pole was Norwegian or British.

Zweig occasionally makes factual errors. He states, for example, that Petrograd changed its name to Petrograd in 1917, when it actually made that change in 1914. He also makes some heroic assumptions, such as that Napoleon would have dominated Europe had he won at Waterloo. He does not always consider all the factors which affected the outcome of events. Moreover, he is not entirely free from the charge of indulging in purple prose (“night always beguiles the senses with fantasy, confusing hope with the sweet poison of dreams”).

However, one should be prepared to overlook all these faults because his vignettes really bring events, and especially their historical characters, vividly to life, and because at his best he writes magnificently (“They move through the icy [Antarctic] air as it drinks human breath for the first time in millennia”).

In short, if one reads this book as a contribution to belles-lettres rather than to historical scholarship, it makes a superb, albeit slim, volume.

The moment where Napoleon relied on an inept commander, and paid the price… the days, weeks and months by which Scott was too late to the South Pole… something uninteresting about the middle East… the train journey from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station that the Pet Shop Boys so pithily immortalised… the crux on which Woodrow Wilson failed in his attempts to leave a changed world after World War One. This book is brilliant at conveying the importance of these specific moments, flashes of time that changed the world. In short, inherently readable and understandable essays (only bowing to the weight of sarcasm and being wise after the event in the later stages), this author which was new to me really gets his points across very well. It's a great shame this is a cobbled-together greatest hits package, and the real thing should have ten or even twelve such chapters, but that's publishing for you – and this selection of five is still good enough to not be sniffed at.