Reply to April 2025 - What are you reading?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I absolutely loved North Woods and recommended it to several people. I love books like that where each story somehow connects to a previous one. The story about the twin sisters was so striking. It’s fascinating to me people don’t like that book!

Right now I’m reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie and I already have the final book in the series (The Romanovs The Final Chapter) waiting for when I finish. Rasputin just entered the picture and the author has done a really good job laying out how desperate Alexandra was about Alexei’s hemophilia to where it’s very understandable how she was duped by Rasputin. [/quote]

Nicholas and Alexandra is one of the classic biographies of all time. The author has a unique perspective because his own son had severe hemophilia, growing up in an era where there was treatment (unlike for Alexei) but it wasn't very good. His son later acquired both HIV and hepatitis C from contaminated blood products in the '80s--he has some rare genetic mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV and has never progressed to AIDS. And the treatment for hepatitis C was a liver transplant so he actually no longer has hemophilia either, since clotting factors are produced in the liver.

I read Nicholas and Alexandra when I was a teenager and was transfixed. It was like a slow motion train wreck, where you know it's all going to end horribly but the journey to get there is still an experience. I was probably around the same age Alexei was when he died, when I read the book--this was too young to fully grasp the complexity of the story but getting my head around the idea of life just stopping for a child at that age consumed me for awhile. I read it again as an adult and got more out of it.[/quote]

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