Another book on the Tudors?

THE TUDORS: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty by G.J. Meyer, 2010.
An excellently written, fresh look at the five monarchs of England known as the Tudors. In a single volume, the author provides an enlightening, myth-debunking, enthralling narrative that covers all the Tudors from the founder of the dynasty, Henry VII, to the last of them, the glorious Elizabeth I. Great description but not so overloaded with detail that the reader gets bogged down, Meyer makes good use of his sources and recent scholarship on this era of English history. All the sinners and saints, statesmen, lovers, victims, the wives of Henry VIII, the Lady Jane Grey episode, Mary I's fatal Spanish marriage, the boy king Edward who wanted a second Protestant Reformation in England--it's all here and done up in very readable and entertaining style. One complaint I read recently was that the author presents too many bad (negative) aspects of these monarchs; I disagree, his goal is to de-romanticize them and make them more human. There were also complaints of events/issues/important figures being left out, but honestly, it's a survey type book, and some things have to be left out. The subtitle is misleading in that sense. I found the book well worth reading, and I would recommend it even for Tudor addicts who think they know all there is to know about them, and even though the length (600+ pages) could be off-putting, I would recommend it to anyone who wants a good general introduction to the Tudors, their lives, and that period of English history.

A KINGDOM STRANGE: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke by James Horn, 2010.

Excellently researched and smoothly written, this reads almost like a novel. Why did dozens of English men, women, and children leave England and voyage to a remote area of the New World? Why was Sir Walter Raleigh so interested in establishing a colony there? And why did it fail? What happened there that caused the disappearance of so many people, never to be explained? Horn does a great job of piecing together the story of the "Lost Colony" from contemporary records and writings, examining and re-examining, and he puts forth his own theory of why the settlement was made and what happened to those Roanoke Island settlers in 1587. Full of great details of seafaring and pirating, Spanish attacks, life at sea and in the new land of Virginia, Indian relations, and intrigues involving Raleigh and others within Queen Elizabeth's court, Horn packs it all in, but does so in a way not to overwhelm the reader. A nicely done, very readable account of one the truly great mysteries in American history.

ISAAC'S STORM by Erik Larson, 1999.
After reading this nonfiction work, I realized why I had put off reading it for so long: I'm just not that interested in the history of weather forecasting. The National Weather Service was still relatively new in 1900 and they weren't taken very seriously, which created all kinds of issues with the government. But there was too much of it for my taste, especially the politcal infighting, plus I just didn't find Isaac Cline a very sympathetic character overall. There are those readers who would get into that sort of detail. For myself, I felt the pace didn't pick up until the narrative became more about the storm itself. The hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, on Sept. 8, 1900--Larson provides wonderfully vivid descriptions of what the hurricane did, the almost total devastation of the city, the number of deaths, the interwoven vignettes of various people and what happened to them, and then the whole aftermath of the storm. Some enthralling reading here: Clara Barton arrived with the Red Cross, people came looking for loved ones gone missing, gawkers came in on trains to see the spectacle of ruin, workers going through enormously high mounds of wreckage, the wholesale burials and burnings of over 6,000 bodies, unusual discoveries, etc. Was it worth my time and effort? Yes, I'm not sorry I read it, I found it enjoyable as a whole, but I was much more interested in the storm itself and the effects of it as opposed to the political maneuverings and intrigues and feuds within the bureau before the monster storm struck Galveston.