The subtitle of Shannon Monaghan’s book, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men: The Forgotten British Special Operations Soldiers of World War II, gave fair warning. Unfortunately, I missed the point. In no way could the men of Britain’s SOE, SAS, Commando, and other World War II special...
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We look upon the 1950s as a decade of conformity when little of consequence happened in the United States. But sweeping generalizations about any period in history are misleading at best, and none more so than about the Fifties. Because the period from the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950...
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Version 1.0.0 He was the first robber baron. Other familiar names from the nineteenth century—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan—were young men in the early days of their careers when he was at the peak of his fame. Following the Civil War, he became the richest person in American...
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You might expect, if you’ve read a little about Winston Churchill, that only during World War II did he become deeply engaged with the military. But that’s far from true. From the time he enlisted in the British Army as a second lieutenant in 1895, Churchill was almost continuously...
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A decade and a half ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. co-produced and narrated a four-episode series on PBS, reporting on the findings he and his team came up with from studying the family history and genetic profile of 12 famous and near-famous Americans. Faces of America aired in...
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That cover photo does not do her justice. Pamela Churchill Harriman (née Digby, 1920-99) was one of the great beauties of the Anglo-American world well into her seventies, and other photos reveal that. She was ridiculed) throughout most of her life as a courtesan, having slept with hundreds of...
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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 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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When we think today of an English Queen, we tend to conjure up the benevolent figure of Elizabeth II, waving from the balcony at Buckingham Palace or from the back seat of a car. Of course, if we read English history—or if we’ve watched the popular Netflix series, The Crown—we know more than...
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Watching Elon Musk unravel is not a pretty sight. And it seems to have become more common since he purchased Twitter last year. But that’s only because most of the time before then he erupted behind the scenes, reaming out employees at Tesla, SpaceX, or one of his several other companies....
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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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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes 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...
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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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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes 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...
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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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...includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest Sci-Fi book review,
plus 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.