Ferdinand III (1608–1657) finally has his first biographer, unconventional though the latter may be. Höbelt quickly advises fellow historians that he approached his emperor the old-fashioned way and is proud of it. Chronologically organized, the book avoids the cultural, anthropological, and psychological questions that academics now put to the lives of people, dead or still with us. Its focus is the house of Habsburg, the “First Family” of Europe, to cite Höbelt. It concentrates on diplomacy, military affairs, in which Ferdinand III was quite well versed, and politics. The last is construed broadly enough to cover interactions among the dynasty's members in Vienna alone and with their Spanish cousins, relations among the emperor's intimates and advisors, and international issues. Where contextually appropriate, Höbelt brings economic dimensions to bear as well.

Readers are not in for a slog through a dry recitation of wars, treaties made and unmade, inflations rates, and the like. Höbelt calls on immense primary documentation and serves it up for maximum effect. He has a gift for humanizing his texts with a few words or phrases drawn from letters and other recorded comments by his cast of characters. He skillfully picks apart the essentials of important issues and the dynamics behind military and political decisions. His contrarian take on the Wallenstein affair—the commander's lethargy displeased the Habsburgs and their consultants and not his ideas and maneuvers—shows the author at his best. So does his analysis of regional and “national” interest groups at Ferdinand III's court, along with his illuminating commentary on the administrative style and organization of that establishment. Especially absorbing is his coverage of the funk-plagued struggle of the Habsburg regime with the complexities of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that Ferdinand III dearly wanted to win. This he did not do, though Höbelt points out that the dynasty was far from defeated, neither in Bohemia nor in Germany, where politics functioned much as they had before the conflict.

Nevertheless, the book leaves one thinking that Ferdinand had more parts than Höbelt reveals with events alone. The king-emperor is educated and wed in a few brisk paragraphs; a nine-page rundown of cultural and recreational pursuits opens the fourth chapter, but these pursuits are never fleshed out. This reader would have happily learned more about the mathematical notions that Ferdinand the composer incorporated into his music. Even the well-reproduced graphics are heavily weighted toward political and military matters. Absent more detail about his many intellectual interests, Ferdinand comes across as dutiful, realistic and hyper-cautious, reluctant to overmedicate himself even to relieve the insomnia that his job brought on. Ostensibly the star of this drama, he most often speaks from the wings and rarely from stage center.

Industrious archival labor in Vienna and the Vatican went into this work. Höbelt also made good use of Austrian provincial archives with holdings on regional aristocratic families such as the Dietrichsteins, Lambergs, and Herbersteins. Research trips to the Czech Republic also uncovered material on several of Ferdinand's ministers and commanders who called Bohemia a “second home.” Höbelt's vast list of secondary literature will also be valuable for researchers who may want to look more closely at a neglected era in Habsburg history.

For all its real merits, the book has some serious drawbacks. Some of these may reflect editorial cost-cutting policy, others carelessness, but taken together they will create problems for many readers. There is no separate listing of abbreviations, and the genealogical table is so stripped down that it leaves out Charles II of Spain, whose demise in 1700 lastingly altered Habsburg relations with the Iberian Peninsula. The first name/last name word order in the bibliography of secondary literature will further complicate the labors of those who consult it, because the endnotes have dispensed with full bibliographical attribution altogether. Perhaps overly accustomed to the macaronic jargon used by seventeenth-century Habsburgs and their court personnel, Höbelt often leaves his many intratextual citations untranslated. Those who can work in German, French, Spanish, Latin and Italian will not mind, but those who cannot may be frustrated. Most bothersome, at least to this reader, are the countless neologisms and turns of phrase drawn from contemporary American English. The lexical lifetime of these coinages is notoriously short; Höbelt apparently assumes that readers fifteen years from now will still respond to them. Last but not least, the more metaphorical these constructions are, the more they try the imaginations of readers, whose command of English may not always be up to decoding them.

A spot check of the endnotes turns up the most serious lapse of all: attributions to authors Bonney, Spielman, and Kleinman in notes 6, 121, and 146 do not document the text on pages 18–19, 106, and 124 as they purport to. This sort of mix-up occurs all too easily in processing databases as massive as the author has assembled here. It is reason, however, for scholars to use the scholarly apparatus for Ferdinand III critically.