The epic story of a legendary WWII Nazi POW camp
World War II prisoner-of-war escapes are a staple of adventure fiction. IMDB lists twenty-one...
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Category: Nonfiction
Misjudgments and misunderstandings in World War II
Historians long debated the Great Man Theory of History attributed to the Scottish essayist Thomas...
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British espionage as the Empire faded into history
Six pivotal events set the course of history in the twentieth century. The emergence of the United...
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Uncovering the truth about Pearl Harbor
When you challenge the historical consensus fundamental to our understanding of the past,...
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The best nonfiction of 2022
Fair warning: although the headline promises the “best nonfiction of 2022,” what follows is not a...
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Unmasking the mole in the CIA
According to most expert observers of the intelligence community, James Jesus Angleton (1917-87)...
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How people really lived in Medieval Europe
What comes first to mind when you think of Europe in the Middle Ages? Unending violence and...
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Repression, censorship, and official violence in the First Red Scare
On Sunday, October 9, 2022, the cover story in the New York Times Book Review featured Adam...
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A revealing new biography of Vladimir Putin
What do we learn about Vladimir Putin from the news media in the West? He’s a kleptocrat,...
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She was the most powerful woman after the Queen
The recent passing of England’s second Queen Elizabeth reminds us that her namesake’s...
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The most important Holocaust memoir
Amazon lists some 2,000 Holocaust memoirs, among them Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958),...
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North Korea makes clear why politics matters
If anyone ever tries to tell you that politics doesn’t matter, I suggest you raise the case...
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Why the U.S. failed to speak out against Hitler’s rise
In the years 1933-41, a passion for isolationism gripped the American psyche, keeping President...
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A researcher looks at the disease we fear the most
A review of The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Dr. Mukherjee, a cancer researcher with clinical experience, surveys the history of cancer from Imhotep to the present day. He combines moving personal experiences, historical vignettes, biographical sketches of some of the fascinating individuals who have advanced our understanding of cancer, and wonderfully articulate explanations of complex scientific matters. The Emperor of All Maladies is this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and it deserves every bit of recognition it’s gotten.
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Viewing humanity as a whole through the lens of history
Sixteen eighty-eight is familiar to many English-speakers as the year of Britain’s Glorious...
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