Few agencies of the US Government resisted women’s liberation and the civil rights movement as long or as fiercely as the CIA. Born in the macho exploits of the OSS in World War II, an old boys’ network continued to direct the country’s premier spy service well into the 1980s. Of...
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A review of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Chronicles the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, only of only three people ever known to have escaped from a North Korean labor camp and made it to the West. A harrowing account of one of the world’s most widespread and most egregious human rights violations.
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In 1860, when civil war erupted, the federal government was a mere shadow of what it has become today. The federal budget was about $63 million, only about $2.5 billion in 2025 dollars. That compares to the $6.6 trillion, or $6,600 billion, the government spent in the the past year. And only about...
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For three seasons early in this century, HBO aired Deadwood, which won more than two dozen Emmy Awards. The series starred Timothy Olyphant as businessman and lawman Seth Bullock and Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, the violent criminal proprietor of a saloon and brothel. Other leading characters...
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During the six years of World War II in Europe, Nazi officials and their collaborators looted some 650,000 works of art. Competing Nazi bureaucracies sent agents throughout the Continent, plundering museums and private Jewish-held collections alike. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who was...
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Mark Twain satirized the period as the Gilded Age, suggesting that an overlay of gold plating hid the seamy reality underneath. Later, historians fixed the term to the years from the late 1870s to the late 1890s. Then, America emerged from the devastation of the Civil War to become the...
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When future historians tally the most consequential revolutionary movements of the modern era, the choices will be obvious. The Russian Revolution re-set the balance of power almost throughout the 20th century. In China, the Communists set the world’s most populous nation on a dramatic new...
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Brace yourself. Much of what you believe about why the Allies won World War II may not be true. British historian Richard Overy challenges the received wisdom in his eye-opening revisionist interpretation of the six-year ordeal, titled simply Why the Allies Won. For most historians, that question...
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Today we speak of “the imperial presidency” to reflect the staggering breadth of the power that the White House has amassed over the past century. And the term is more apt than ever today under the expansive view of presidential power that has motivated the Roberts Supreme Court to...
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For some unfathomable reason, Antony Beevor is one of Britain’s most popular and widely read military historians. It’s true that he knows a great deal about military matters. He’s a former army officer and teaches at military staff colleges in Britain, the US, and other...
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Among the most momentous events in world history, World War I stands out for the breadth and depth of its consequences. The fighting was a principal cause of the Russian Revolution. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires disintegrated, their monarchs deposed. The United States...
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When we think about the CIA, we tend to conjure up images of brush passes, dead drops, codes and ciphers, counter-surveilliance techniques, and so forth—all the trappings of spycraft we’ve picked up from the work of John le Carré, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and their latter-day descendants....
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A handful of rich white men played leading roles in the American independence movement and the early years of the republic they created. You know their names: George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Others—John Jay and Aaron...
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Chances are, you’d never come across the term “artificial intelligence” as recently as a decade ago. And even if you had, it was probably either in reading science fiction or working in the tech industry. For the rest of us, AI was far off the radar screen. Yet today, you...
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For many Americans today, the daily mail is a nuisance rather than a cherished service. Most advertising matter (and many bills) go straight into the trash. It’s been years since we wrote letters to one another. In fact, when we read how frequently authors, public officials, and family...
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A review of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. ★★★★★. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. The number of prisoners of African-American and Latino descent is wildly out of proportion to their share of the general population, and the War on Drugs accounts for the lion’s share of the difference.
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A review of The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). One of the freshest and most important contributions in many years to the public discourse about the future of the United States.
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The history we learn in school often bears little resemblance to what really happened. We know, of course, that George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree or tossed a dollar across the Potomac. But what we believe about more consequential events frequently turns out to be wrong, too....
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Throughout its eight-decade history, the Central Intelligence Agency has racked up an extraordinary number of clandestine operations gone wrong. Of course, the agency’s defenders assert we don’t know about the many successes that have never seen the light of day as well as a few that...
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Close observers could see signs of President Joe Biden’s physical and neurological decline even before he took office in January 2021. But, as journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson detail in their explosive new book, Original Sin, “what was going on in private was worse.” Far...
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...includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.