The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia

If you're looking for a book that will take you out of your comfortable life and into another, not so comfortable existence, this is the one. I love Russian history. It is fascinating how leaders were chosen or not chosen, how brutality led to more brutality, how it took death, starvation, and absolute despair for a people to rise up against autocracy. 

And this book tells the story well. Read it! Ages 12 and up.

[A] superb history.... In these thrilling, highly readable pages, we meet Rasputin, the shaggy, lecherous mystic...; we visit the gilded ballrooms of the doomed aristocracy; and we pause in the sickroom of little Alexei, the hemophiliac heir who, with his parents and four sisters, would be murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.”