You’ve probably never heard her name before. But if you fly frequently she may have saved your life. Her name was Roxie Laybourne, and she was of all unlikely things the world’s first forensic ornithologist. In 1960, when Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crashed on takeoff from Logan...
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For most Americans, the enduring image of World War II in the Philippines is the iconic shot of General Douglas MacArthur wading onto the shore of Leyte Island on October 20, 1944. The photo was posed, part of the general’s public relations campaign to grab headlines at home. But MacArthur...
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Mark Twain satirized the period as the Gilded Age, suggesting that an overlay of gold plating hid the seamy reality underneath. Later, historians fixed the term to the years from the late 1870s to the late 1890s. Then, America emerged from the devastation of the Civil War to become the...
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Today we speak of “the imperial presidency” to reflect the staggering breadth of the power that the White House has amassed over the past century. And the term is more apt than ever today under the expansive view of presidential power that has motivated the Roberts Supreme Court to...
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Throughout its eight-decade history, the Central Intelligence Agency has racked up an extraordinary number of clandestine operations gone wrong. Of course, the agency’s defenders assert we don’t know about the many successes that have never seen the light of day as well as a few that...
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Famous generals proliferate in American history. After all, ours is a story of conquest and almost unceasing warfare from the earliest days of European settlement on the North American continent well into the 21st century. The names of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, Douglas...
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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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...includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction 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.
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.