I received this book from netgalley for free for an honest review. This was very educational and lightning. I can't wait to do a deep dive into these stories .

So these days I really stick mostly to fiction. I'll pick up an occasional book about the black plague, or body language, or ghost stories from Scotland, etc but it's less and less often as there are just too many books on my ever-growing TBR.

However I throw on the history channel for background noise while working pretty often. So when I saw this cover/book title I figured I'd check out the blurb at the very least because it so easily caught my eye. Then the blurb itself sounded interesting and here we are.

I absolutely don't regret taking a break from the fiction because this book was highly entertaining in so many ways. Obviously the historical part of it was full of interesting bits but I found the human side of it to be a far bigger part than I had expected it to be. This book doesn't just list out, "here is this story about this person in this time period,' it really gives you every possible detail available to flesh out the people discussed. As much as is possible looking back in history you feel like you can see them, where they lived and how. I was even finding myself learning random bits of information about various time periods in general I'd never heard before or thought about. Such as one account of getting the maid pregnant and the resulting marriage and where she and their son ended up living vs where he ended up living, how society took it, how they viewed it, etc. I'd never considered how that situation would have played out with how common of a story it is in the media both fictional and non.

All in all this book was extremely informative on the history side of things but also humanizing the people discussed as it gave you a look into the past. The figures we meet are across the board names I'd never heard of before but their stories are full of ups and downs and I found myself researching them online along side reading this book because I wanted to know more about them.

If you enjoy a good historical read this was well worth it.

Thank you to Netgalley and University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books) for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.