12 eur + 2.90 de Portes (livro de 1340 gramas, 2.30 eur envio correio editorial + .60 eur de envelope almofadado.)

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Simon Sebag Montefiore – Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar - Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2004, Trata-se da 7 reimpressão (Fevereiro de 2004) da 1ª edição absoluta (Julho 2003), 693 páginas.

A sobrecapa tem pequenas manchas de tinta cinzenta que quase passam por simples machas de sujidade/pó, mas que não o são, não se conseguem limpar, e que podem ser vistas:

- na foto 1: na zona da virilha do homem estendido; em baixo, o pequeno ponto sob o "E" final de "Montefiore"; no topo, os 3 pontos por cima e entre as pernas do "N"
- na foto 3: os pontos no topo, junto à lombada; em baixo, as manchas maiores, entre o código de barras e a lombada.

De resto, livro em muito bom estado, miolo impecável, sem notas ou sublinhados mas com uma assinatura de posse, a caneta azul, na página de rosto, como pode ver na 6ª foto.

Papel de qualidade

Profusamente ilustrado, 3, 4 dezenas de fotos em 4 secções (épocas da vida de Stalin) diferentes espalhadas ao longo do livro

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Review da Publisher's weekly:

Montefiore (The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin ) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths.

In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him.

As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, "craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players." Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted.

There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted.

Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example.

He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted. Montefiore mainly skirts the paranoia issue, noting that only after WWII, when Stalin launched his anti-Semitic campaigns, did he "become a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite."

There are many Stalin biographies out there, but this fascinating work distinguishes itself by its extensive use of fresh archival material and its focus on Stalin's ever-changing coterie.