A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

For a number of reasons, it's rare I choose a history book for Phinney by Post, our backlist subscription, but Morton's 1979 microhistory made for a nice fit, both for its slim size and especially for its style: it reads, as the cliche goes, like a novel. Morton slides freely into the emotional lives of his characters, from his main figure, the Crown Prince Rudolf—“the most nervous man in the most nervous century”—to a chorus of contemporary Viennese, from Freud to Klimt, who are less noteworthy in this story for their achievements than for their moods. In fact, it reads like a specific novel: Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March (a Liz favorite), with which it shares both a soundtrack (those waltzes!) and a tone, an almost menacingly delicate irony that's a perfect match for the decadent decline of the Habsburg Empire.