Most of us, at least in the United States, learned a little about the famous “Monkey Trial” early in our schooling. It was, in fact, a milestone in the national debate over whether science or religion should dominate in considering Charles Darwin’s monumental breakthrough in our...
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He served our country for eighteen years, the longest-running, highest-ranking CIA asset in the history of the Cold War. He was active as a spy for the United States during the most intense years of the Cold War, from 1961 to 1980. And by then his “briefing transcripts and photocopies of...
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Few topics have so dominated conversation in America since November 8, 2016, as the behavior of the country’s forty-fifth president. Some commentators have likened the attention received by Donald Trump to that afforded Ronald Reagan three decades earlier. But there’s no comparison: Trump wins...
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If you’ve been reading my reviews for very long, you’re aware that the World War II era holds special fascination for me. This might have something to do with the fact that I was born then—in fact, about six months before the USA entered the war. Or maybe it’s just because it all...
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For thousands of years the Han people who settled China’s heartland around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers have contended with people of other ethnicities on what is now the nation’s periphery. For extended periods, marauders from that region—Mongolians, Manchurians, and Muslim Turkic...
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Military historians point to Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) as the first modern Special Forces. Formed in Egypt in 1941 by David Stirling as a paratroop unit, the SAS later spawned the Special Boat Service (SBS) for maritime operations. Both organizations sometimes traded personnel with...
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A quarter-century ago two widely read books by computer scientist Ray Kurzweil helped ignite a debate about humanity’s future. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005) envisioned a world then a half-century in the future in which homo sapiens would merge with...
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We Americans have long believed that the US military is the most advanced and most capable in the world. But in some respects that’s no longer the case. For example, China’s new, nuclear-armed hypersonic missiles could destroy in an instant the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy’s...
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Few people have any idea how many new books there are every year. According to Steven Piersanti, Founder and Senior Editor at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, quoting a 2023 report in Publishers Weekly, 2.3 million books were self-published in the US in 2021. And a recent industry estimate is that each...
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William Randolph Hearst thundered into New York City in 1895, intent on making history with a brash new approach to writing and selling newspapers. The following year he bought the ailing New York Evening Journal to compete with his old mentor, Joseph Pulitzer, who published the city’s...
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No, in spite of this book’s title, it’s not a story about a Russian spy in the CIA’s Moscow Station. It’s something much more engaging—an account of a long-running counterespionage investigation into KGB surveillance technology at the US Embassy in Moscow. An investigation...
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The word “shogun” entered the English language in 1975 with the publication of James Clavell’s blockbuster bestselling novel, Shogun. And it gained broader attention earlier this year with the release of the 10-episode FX television series of the same name. Now, a professor of...
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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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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.