Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Danubia is, for me at least, a rather unusual history book. The author is not kidding about the “personal history” aspect! The narrative is very anecdotal and tends to jump from place to place within the former Habsburg empire, but it does remain in roughly chronological order. Although the personal stories form the places that the author visited can make for a choppy narrative in places, it also makes it easy to put the book down and pick it back up again a week or two later.

I found that the author’s personal stories about the places he visited in the course of his research really brought the Empire to life and added quite a bit of color to what can often be the tedious tale of the Habsburgs and their domains. There’s a lot of Central European history here, but by focusing on places and people and their stories, the book is much more enjoyable than most of histories of the Habsburg empire. I really enjoyed reading it, and if you’re interested in the history of Central Europe I recommend that you give it a try.