Review of 'Black Diamonds: The Rise And Fall Of A Great English Dynasty' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Quite rambling. It's a book about the last few generation of the Fitzwilliam family. Not at all the rise of the family as they were already astronomically rich at the beginning of the book. It's also a book about everybody anybody in the Fitzwilliam family ever knew, a more or less birth to death account of the lot of them + a history lesson in the lives of the miners and a detailed account of the governments struggle to seize control of the mines away from the aristocracy who owned them. Really the actual Fitzwilliam main family branch probably only takes up may a quarter of the book, it felt like. Is it really necessary to devote such an enormous chunk of it to Kick Kennedy and her struggles to marry someone else, when her connection to the Fitzwilliam line was a passionate but very brief love affair the ended …
Quite rambling. It's a book about the last few generation of the Fitzwilliam family. Not at all the rise of the family as they were already astronomically rich at the beginning of the book. It's also a book about everybody anybody in the Fitzwilliam family ever knew, a more or less birth to death account of the lot of them + a history lesson in the lives of the miners and a detailed account of the governments struggle to seize control of the mines away from the aristocracy who owned them. Really the actual Fitzwilliam main family branch probably only takes up may a quarter of the book, it felt like. Is it really necessary to devote such an enormous chunk of it to Kick Kennedy and her struggles to marry someone else, when her connection to the Fitzwilliam line was a passionate but very brief love affair the ended with her death? Or is it assumed to be interesting because she was a Kennedy?
I was quite bored for a large part of this book. The fact that when I bought the audiobook I thought it would be a novel probably didn't help either.
