When you read, what floats your boat? If you said “mystery and thrillers,” “history,” or “biographies and memoirs,” you’re in good company. According to the best data I can locate online, those three categories are at the top of the list of all genres in popularity among American readers. To prove the point, here from […]
Continue Reading...For decades, the pivotal role many women played in codebreaking, espionage, and the Resistance in World War II went largely unappreciated. But with the advent of the twenty-first century, historians have begun bringing more of their extraordinary stories to light. In some cases, what they write reflects newly declassified files. But in others it’s merely […]
Continue Reading...For many years, I’ve been reading a great deal about World War II, both fiction and nonfiction. And that reading is reflected in the reviews I’ve collected at 5 top nonfiction books about World War II and The 10 best novels about World War II, both of which include dozens of runners-up. But in the […]
Continue Reading...The virtue of history is that it affords us perspective—not just the distance that the passage of time occasions but the ability to grasp the importance of events that may have been only dimly understood at the time. What might seem of paramount importance to contemporaries may fade into obscurity as the years go by. […]
Continue Reading...If you’re a bibliophile, you may visit the website of Lit Hub or read one of its newsletters. I do. I get my fix of literary comment and criticism on a daily basis from Lit Hub. And I rushed to click through to The Ultimate Best Books of 2019 List by Emily Temple (Lit Hub, December 11, […]
Continue Reading...What follows is my best effort to list (in no particular order) the ten biggest issues Washington ignores – issues the White House and Congress should be addressing, but aren’t – and maybe never will. 1. The climate crisis Rarely do political issues rise to the level of existential crisis. This one does. As Mark […]
Continue Reading...We all know some writers make it, and some don’t. In fact, most people who are gripped with the obsession to write a book never make a dime from it, if they can even get it into print. (Even self-publishing isn’t all that easy for the technologically challenged, as it turns out.) But what’s not […]
Continue Reading...Back in the nineteenth century an Italian engineer and economist named Vilfredo Pareto advanced the hypothesis that in any circumstances, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This thesis is known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule. As a rule of thumb, the theory works, but only in a […]
Continue Reading...You’re gonna love this. Once upon a time, back in the distant reaches of the twentieth century—well, actually it was 1984—one of my clients assigned me to ghostwrite a fundraising letter that Isaac Asimov had agreed to sign. I approached the task with some trepidation, both because I knew Asimov’s reputation as a […]
Continue Reading...Chances are, any book that you might write will never make you the world’s bestselling author. Sales for most books written today are pathetically low. As I noted in an earlier post, the average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling fewer than 250 copies per year and fewer than 2,000 copies over its lifetime. And […]
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