We study history to learn where we’ve come from and how we got to where we are. But we’re dependent on the politicians, scholars, and commentators to deliver an active account of the past. And few world leaders in our planet’s history have been more dramatically caricatured than...
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Even if your knowledge of English history is sketchy at best, you’re likely to have heard of the Norman Conquest, the Black Death . . . and the Wars of the Roses. You may then be surprised to learn, as Dan Jones informs us in his account of that famous conflict, that the so-called...
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Sixteen million people served in the United States armed forces during World War II. But only about one in five experienced direct combat. And of those a much smaller number bore the brunt of the fighting on the front lines in daily contact with the enemy. Even among them a small fraction...
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Few agencies of the US Government resisted women’s liberation and the civil rights movement as long or as fiercely as the CIA. Born in the macho exploits of the OSS in World War II, an old boys’ network continued to direct the country’s premier spy service well into the 1980s. Of...
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A review of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Chronicles the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, only of only three people ever known to have escaped from a North Korean labor camp and made it to the West. A harrowing account of one of the world’s most widespread and most egregious human rights violations.
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In 1860, when civil war erupted, the federal government was a mere shadow of what it has become today. The federal budget was about $63 million, only about $2.5 billion in 2025 dollars. That compares to the $6.6 trillion, or $6,600 billion, the government spent in the the past year. And only about...
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For three seasons early in this century, HBO aired Deadwood, which won more than two dozen Emmy Awards. The series starred Timothy Olyphant as businessman and lawman Seth Bullock and Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, the violent criminal proprietor of a saloon and brothel. Other leading characters...
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During the six years of World War II in Europe, Nazi officials and their collaborators looted some 650,000 works of art. Competing Nazi bureaucracies sent agents throughout the Continent, plundering museums and private Jewish-held collections alike. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who was...
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When future historians tally the most consequential revolutionary movements of the modern era, the choices will be obvious. The Russian Revolution re-set the balance of power almost throughout the 20th century. In China, the Communists set the world’s most populous nation on a dramatic new...
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Brace yourself. Much of what you believe about why the Allies won World War II may not be true. British historian Richard Overy challenges the received wisdom in his eye-opening revisionist interpretation of the six-year ordeal, titled simply Why the Allies Won. For most historians, that question...
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For some unfathomable reason, Antony Beevor is one of Britain’s most popular and widely read military historians. It’s true that he knows a great deal about military matters. He’s a former army officer and teaches at military staff colleges in Britain, the US, and other...
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Among the most momentous events in world history, World War I stands out for the breadth and depth of its consequences. The fighting was a principal cause of the Russian Revolution. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires disintegrated, their monarchs deposed. The United States...
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When we think about the CIA, we tend to conjure up images of brush passes, dead drops, codes and ciphers, counter-surveilliance techniques, and so forth—all the trappings of spycraft we’ve picked up from the work of John le Carré, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and their latter-day descendants....
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A handful of rich white men played leading roles in the American independence movement and the early years of the republic they created. You know their names: George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Others—John Jay and Aaron...
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For many Americans today, the daily mail is a nuisance rather than a cherished service. Most advertising matter (and many bills) go straight into the trash. It’s been years since we wrote letters to one another. In fact, when we read how frequently authors, public officials, and family...
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The history we learn in school often bears little resemblance to what really happened. We know, of course, that George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree or tossed a dollar across the Potomac. But what we believe about more consequential events frequently turns out to be wrong, too....
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In high school civics classes or college courses in political science, many of us in the United States have learned a little about the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. A few keywords surface in memory. The Army-McCarthy hearings. HUAC. The Hollywood Blacklist. Richard Nixon’s smear tactics....
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It’s well known that Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century British historian, is credited with first calling economics “the dismal science.” What’s much less widely appreciated is that this derogatory label was well justified when he set the phrase down on paper in 1849. During...
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For 70,000 years or more, homo sapiens has been on the move. First, within Africa, when changing climate forced whole communities to move across the continent. Then, when a venturesome few slipped across the land bridges joining Africa and Asia to begin our species’ dispersal throughout the...
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World War II might have ended six months earlier if General Bernard Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden had worked. The plan called for American, British, and Polish paratroopers to drop behind German lines in the Netherlands in September 1944. Its objective was to capture the one remaining...
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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.