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Summary: Stunning
Review: The world into which Tolstoy plunges his readers in the first paragraph of War and Peace is one that has vanished only to be revived every time one picks up his masterpiece. War and Peace covers all the gamut of human feelings, from love to betrayal to hope to jealousy. Tolstoy's keen understanding of human nature in all its forms drew me into the plot and permitted me to truly enjoy his novel. The characters literally leapt from the paper to become, in my mind, true, living people whom I got to know as well as my own friends.
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Summary: Simply the best; as good as advertised
Review: I disagree with those who earlier stated that the final philosophical chapters detracted from the book. If you have a genuine appreciation for history, it all only adds to the book's richness. Despite its length, War and Peace reads quite fast, and every word and character is worth it. I got more out out of this book than any other - fiction or non - that I have ever read. It enriched my life and is quite simply the finest piece of literature I have ever read.
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Summary: Do not be scared by its length it is a marvellous read.
Review: This is a beautifully written and translated book. Tolstoy knows how to tell a grand story weavng different characters and events together with the mastery of a quilter. The description of Pierre getting ready for his wedding is one of the most moving and funny in literature. This is a book that people often lie about having read so as not to appear uneducated and people who have are branded'egg heads' People should read it for pure pleasure and nothing else. I read it over 30 years ago while waiting for my first child to arrive and finished it the day after she was born.
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Summary: It is beautiful.
Review: War and Peace is one of the best novels that I have read so far. Tolstoy very successfully brings out the humanness in his characters and it is a pleasure to watch and understand the characters from their turbulence in thought and action. I think I learnt a lot about people , various kinds of them and the restlessness ( as he shows in Pierre Bezukhov) which in my opinion is present in varying degrees in most of us. The novel part of War and Peace keeps you in a trance. However I found the last part of the book which is the philosophical treatise on free will and personal choice in shaping history,not so attractive. Personally I find it difficult to agree with this line of thinking which Tolstoy puts forth. However I must say in conclusion that War and Peace is one of the most enjoyable and enriching books that I have read so far.
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Summary: Escape into your own romance: War and Peace
Review: Even Tolstoy refused to call it a book. Instead, think of it as virtual reality, 19th century style. Pursued at leisure, with time taken for dreams as well, War and Peace will transport you to Russia at the time of Napoleon, a time truly of love and hate, strength and suffering, life and death... That is Tolstoy genius, the facility to twine stories, moods, and scenes to make a distant time and country come alive. The characters live, they grow, they fascinate. Perhaps one can read and not be changed, but that same person would be one who could also love, and not change. A book to immerse in, to live in, to leave on the bookstand for months on end. A footnote: War and Peace has unfortunately slid into the same pit as Moby Dick, Silas Marner, Wuthering Heights, and everything that Dickens ever wrote. Ignore the company and read the book. Another note: Woody Allen said once that he had learned speed-reading and then read War and Peace on a plane flight from Los Angeles to New York. The verdict? "It's about Russia".
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Summary: The greatest book ever written
Review: War and Peace has the reputation of the greatest book ever written, and it doesn't dissapoint. You don't so much read this book as live it.
What Tolstoy has done so effectively is to give himself room to let the characters grow. You don't get a three page info-mercial about each character, but you get to know them from their thoughts and their interactions with other people. The result of this is that when something profound happens to a character, or within a character, this change reverberates deeply within the reader.
The scope of this book is enourmous. Tolstoy takes you from romances, to battles, inside the mind of Napolean, and most of all death.
War and Peace not only tells a great story, it raises interesting questions such as man's free-will and whether there's a god. It does so through the characters self doubt and trials, and results in an amazing and powerful book.
If you havn't read it, don't be discouraged by the size, you MUST read it!
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Summary: War and Peace is one of the best books I've ever read.
Review: War and Peace is one of those books that you never forget (at least I never will). It's a wonderful story of how various people in Russia dealt with the French invasion. I really appreciated how I could identify with the characters. Another thing that I liked about War and Peace is that it made history really believable and exciting
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Summary: Long as heck, but a good read!
Review: What is Power? What is the power which moves nations? This is the ultimate question of War and Peace. The growth of the characters is amazing. Totally recomended.
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Summary: The Literary Masterpiece
Review: I have read "War & Peace" twice. I was thirteen the first time I read it, sixteen the second time. I don't say this to brag; rather, I want to encourage more people to read this astounding book. I think people are afraid of it because of its size. But if I can read it, you can! Russia comes alive through Tolstoy's pen in the most amazing way. He paints the vast landscapes, the passionate Russian people, the historical events of the times (the early 1800s) like a master painter. "War & Peace" is, in effect, art, a massive collage of images, textures, and colors. It is soap operatic in that it has several threads woven together within the narrative. Occasionally, it is difficult to keep them apart, but does get better if you just stick with it. I understand that there are some parts many people find boring, such as Tolstoy's philosophizing and his lengthy descriptions. Yet those, to me, make this novel even more vivid, the characters and Tolstoy himself more alive. Tolstoy has a gift with characters; you feel transported back to the nineteenth century drawing rooms of wealthy Russia, with the silken swish of ladies' skirts and the haze of cigar smoke. "War & Peace" is not for everyone. Yet those who make their way through it will be rewarded many times over.
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Summary: Yes, the Greatest Novel Ever Written
Review: I have read a lot of books and so I've scrabbled together a fairly intelligent idea of what a great book is; the definition has always been complicated and hard to explain, but I really needn't have bothered. The concept can be summed up in only three words: "War and Peace".
This is, simply, what all novels want to be when they grow up. The novel format is as varied as the writers who attempt it---to call "War and Peace" and "Ulysses" examples of the same art form seems ridiculous, but it's true---but ultimately a novel is a story about humans that explains what humanity is, or might be, or could have been; through these characters whose adventures you're following, you might learn something about what it means to be a human being. Every art form is about this experience, but only the novel can really hunker down and explore humanity in all its billions of shapes. You can learn not only facts and feelings but you can learn TIME by spending it in these pages. You can learn GROWTH. You can learn LIFE.
The main characters in "War and Peace" are Pierre Bezuhov, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostov, three Russians caught in the middle of the war between their country and France in the years 1805 to 1813. Through them we meet dozens if not hundreds more characters, and through those dozens or hundreds we simply meet humanity itself. There's no other way to express it. The way Tolstoy tells us about his characters shows us ourselves; the identification is that strong. When a character falls, in battle or from old age, we feel that someone we know personally is gone, and we mourn them as though we couldn't simply flip back a few pages and resurrect them. The mass of life in this book is overwhelming: the story, like the title, is so big it seems impossible that you could find a moment of intimacy, but in fact there are hours here, even days. There is so much contained in the book, battles and weddings, parties and firestorms, evacuations and reunions, military history and moral philosophy, yet Tolstoy never loses track of his characters and how they are evolving while they watch the world tear itself apart and try, almost pitifully, to put itself back together again. It's an absolutely superhuman performance, one no writer could have dared hope for. Only one writer in history ever did it, and no writer ever will again.
"War and Peace" gets its reputation not from dusty old college professors, but from the sheer power of its story and the awesome scope of its understanding, and its ability to impart that understanding to the reader in the guise of a riveting tale of adventure and romance. The novel survives not because it's A CLASSIC, but because it is impossible to pick it up and not be sucked into its hurricane of humanity.
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