She ran a modest haberdashery shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Fredericka Mandelbaum, an “upright widow, philanthropic synagogue-goer, [and] doting mother of four,” was also the boss of the country’s most notorious crime syndicate. And when Pinkerton detectives finally staged a...
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A century ago the United States government shut down the fledgling spy service the Wilson Administration had established to help wage the Great War. And America was out of the espionage business until 1942, when FDR authorized the formation of the OSS. Today, the American intelligence community...
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Historians frequently write of “the Long Nineteenth Century” from 1789 to 1914. In The First World War, the acclaimed military historian John Keegan shows how dramatically the events of 1914 to 1918 capped that period. The “Great War” led to the dismemberment of the four...
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Before the dawn of the Common Era two thousand years ago, Julius Caesar gave the land its name, Germania. But it was nineteen hundred years before the land became a country. That happened only in 1871 when the ruthless and brilliant Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck united twenty-five...
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This book is a story about how one nation, the United States, turned people’s minds into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we, the people, can put down our weapons and build something better.” So writes Annalee Newitz in the preface to Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the...
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A few other names crop up from time to time. But the four men who rode atop the wave of the Gilded Age were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. Their business activities during the final four decades of the nineteenth century drove America’s ascension into the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Scan any list of the physicists, chemists, and other top scientists who created the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. What you’ll find there, one after another, are the names of Europeans who’d fled the Nazis in the 1930s. They dominate the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes One-fifth of the world’s eight billion people profess Roman Catholicism, giving the impression they all share same faith. But of course that’s far from the truth. With 1.4 billion adherents today sprawled across six continents, the Catholic Church...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes A century ago, in the wake of World War I, a large bomb detonated on Wall Street. Thirty-eight people died, and hundreds more suffered injuries. Although no one claimed responsibility, authorities concluded that anarchists had set it off. And no wonder. For...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Since NAFTA took effect in 1994, “more than 60,000 American manufacturers permanently shut their doors. . . In textiles alone, more than a million manufacturing jobs evaporated between 1990 and 2019.” That fact, brought starkly to light in Rachel...
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Estimated reading time: 8 minutes Common-sense observers, most historians included, assert that the roots of World War II lay in the rubble of the Great War a quarter-century earlier. Most ascribe the fault to the draconian Treaty of Versailles that imposed such harsh terms on Germany, and that...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes No country in the world suffered greater devastation in World War II than Poland, not even the Soviet Union, where as many as twenty-seven million people died. Poland’s six million dead represented an even higher proportion of the pre-war population—about...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes When we study American history in high school or college, we learn that Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from the French and James Polk launched the Mexican-American War. But what we don’t often learn about are the context in which Presidents...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Name just about any billionaire in the tech industry, and Kara Swisher is sure to know him. In fact, she’s probably interviewed him several times onstage at her events or her podcasts or for her New York Times column, the Wall Street Journal, or one of the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes They ruled England (and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland from time to time) for more than three centuries. By my count, there were sixteen of them in all. They held sway, sometimes shakily, from 1154 to 1485. French in origin—their family’s roots lay in the...
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Estimated reading time: 11 minutes Anti-Nazi resistance movements emerged in every country in Occupied Europe, including Germany itself. Historians rate the most effective of them to have been in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there is little in print published in...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Part history, part memoir, part travelogue, Smoke and Ashes is the latest work by acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh. Grounded in the extensive research he conducted in writing his extraordinary Ibis Trilogy, this new history of opium traces the story of the...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes What most of us in the US know about Cuba revolves around three events. The Spanish-American War (“Remember the Maine” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders). The Bay of Pigs Invasion. And the Cuban Missile Crisis. But our two countries have a much...
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A review of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). There is persuasive evidence that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earlier generations of scholars had suspected.
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Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction 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.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction 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.