Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Review

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(More customer reviews)I buy a lot of books from Amazon[.com] and, because I am so busy reading them, I do not often review them. This biography of Samuel Pepys was just terrific, so I had to say something about it.
I am a history buff and suppose anyone buying this book would have to be. Samuel Pepys, as it turns out, was a lot more than just a diarist. He was, in effect, what we would call Secretary of the Navy during the Restoration.
Raised as a Puritan, he successfully made the switch to a Stuart supporter when The Restoration became inevitable after Oliver Cromwell died and his son just did not measure up to the job.
We are taken into the world of an ambitious man clawing his way up to the top of the greasy pole. He knows how it is done--and how to make money from bribes (and convince yourself that you are not doing anything immoral at the same time). The way things were done in 17th century was a bit different than it is in the modern US--and perhaps a bit of the same.
The most riveting bit about Pepys life was an operation he underwent in 1658 for the removal of a bladder stone. It goes without saying that there was no anesthesia in those days. First they tied you down and then they cut and probed; there is an illustration of someone trussed up like a turkey with a probe inserted in--well, you have to see it.
Great pain and death was a daily companion for those living before anesthesia--and I am not even going to talk about tooth pain. Death, moreover, was all around. Children died from all sorts of diseases that are easily curable now. Any sort of fever could end in death--and, of course, there was bubonic plague, which killed off about 1/6 of London's population in a single year.
I found this book absolutely riveting. It is 378 pages of text (and oodles of pages of notes for the compulsive people like me who read them). I read it in 3 days.
If you are interested in English history you will love this book. Maybe one of these days I will even get around to reading Pepys' diaries.

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