A review of The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King, by Rich Cohen. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). The extraordinary story of the man who added bananas to America’s diet, helped establish the State of Israel, and brought down the government of Guatemala.
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Elizabeth Taylor, she wasn’t. Nor was she the Cleopatra of Shakespeare’s imagination, or of Plutarch’s. Cleopatra was, simply put, one of the ablest and most powerful women in history. She ruled unchallenged the richest kingdom of the Western world for more than two decades. In...
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Someone famous probably urged us never to delve too deeply into the lives of our heroes since we’re so likely to become cruelly disappointed. And you may have held a vision of Lawrence as one of the few genuine heroes of the 20th Century—a vision nourished by David Lean’s 1962 film...
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Rome’s death throes sputtered out not in the fifth century, as is widely believed, but in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, “the Conqueror.” He then renamed the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire Istanbul. Yet the Ottoman Empire—eventually...
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He was the most famous man in the world, and more places are named after him than anyone else. To many of the giants of his time—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau—he was a colossus whose genius overshadowed their own. He was the first...
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For a century, from the 1870s to the 1960s, their family name was one of the most recognizable in the world. They were wealthy beyond the limits of imagination, and they married into European royalty and other ultra wealthy families such as the Rothschilds. Their roots lay in ancient Babylon. For...
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Why, you might ask, should an American care to read a history of medieval England? Of course, that’s a question most of us would shrug off. But for me the reasons are clear. The period before and after the Norman Invasion of 1066 was a time with clear echoes in our day. Yes, here...
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What do we learn about Vladimir Putin from the news media in the West? He’s a kleptocrat, with a fortune variously estimated at $40 billion or $100 billion. A thug, with a brutal history as a KGB officer. He came to power in 2000 on the strength of a series of FSB operations that cost the...
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The recent passing of England’s second Queen Elizabeth reminds us that her namesake’s reign was even more consequential. After all, Elizabeth I gave her name to the era she helped shape during the forty-five years she sat on the throne. And few periods in Western history have attracted...
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Sometime late in the 1980s, I was speaking with the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. The conversation turned to the stock market and how poor a guide it was to the country’s economic health. He pointed to General Electric and its CEO, Jack Welch. The company had consistently been posting...
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Joe Biden is the 46th in the line of US Presidents who have served since 1789. Every list of the greatest among them invariably includes George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and (usually) Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is no consensus among historians about the men who fall into the second tier. But...
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A review of Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Donovan was a law unto himself both in his (often-public) private life and in his extended role during World War II as the founding director of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He went head-to-head with many of the most powerful, stubbornest, and most manipulative figures of the age, including Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevent, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-Shek, and J. Edgar Hoover — and, more often than not, came out the winner.
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One of the reasons the resistance to Nazism within Germany itself was so meager was the refusal of the Allies to support the men and women who opposed Hitler. Still, many brave souls persisted nonetheless, hoping to overturn the Third Reich and reach a peace agreement with the Americans and...
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So, here’s a biography of one academic social psychologist by another one, and guess what? It’s fascinating! Most of the credit has to go to the subject of this book, Stanley Milgram, whose experiments without question made him the most famous social psychologist to ever trod the halls...
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Most accounts of World War II convey the impression that Britain speedily turned to Winston Churchill as Prime Minister once Hitler’s stormtroopers proved the folly of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. Through his indomitable will and soaring rhetoric, Churchill then rallied...
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He was born shortly after George Washington began his second term as President. When he died a decade after the Civil War, he was the richest man the new nation had ever seen. His fortune of $100 million “controlled one of every twenty American dollars in circulation at that time.”...
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The man’s own story—The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin—is one of the most widely read books in American history. The image that comes through in that unfinished account, which Franklin called his Memoirs, is that of a pious, straitlaced striver, ever ready with an admonition to hard work...
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Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Robert Service, Stephen Kotkin, Robert Conquest, and Simon Sebag Montefiore have all produced widely-read accounts of Joseph Stalin’s life. They’re among scores of others. In fact, Amazon dredges up more than 1,000 titles in response to the query...
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The earthshaking events of the 1960s and the cataclysm of World War II have led many of us to think about the 1950s as a boring period when little of importance happened. It was a time between epochal events. And as Jim Newton explains in his superb biography of Dwight Eisenhower during his eight...
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Most accounts of Allied spies in World War II highlight their heroic exploits. Stealing top-secret documents. Operating clandestine radios. Leading scores or hundreds of Resistance fighters in battle. Or blowing up Nazi troop trains. Aline Griffith did none of these things. But the fascinating...
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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.