Former World Bank economist Liaquat Ahamed earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History for Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. His book explored the causes of the Great Depression and made a compelling argument that central bankers’ stubborn adherence to the gold standard had...
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Crime in its innumerable manifestations has always been with us. But organized crime, American style—commanding the attention of government at the highest level—only came into existence in the US in the years leading up to the First World War. Then, immigrants on New York City’s Lower East...
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Most of what appears in print today about the OSS in World War II dwells on the heroic men and women it infiltrated into France to sabotage the Nazis or in the China-Burma-India theater. Of course, “Wild Bill” Donovan’s brief as head of the Office of Strategic Services was much...
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Some of us, schooled in idealized portraits of ancient civilizations such as Rome and Greece and China, jump to conclusions about how history is repeating itself when we see superficial similarities to what we think took place thousands of years ago. Of course, we do know that history...
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Twenty-nine-year-old Richard Newhall was teaching history at Harvard. Younger at 22, George Haydock, a Quaker, was a recent graduate, as was Alexander McKinlock a wealthy football hero. Younger still, William Morgan was an undergraduate there. By contrast, graduate George Redwood was a celerated...
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Biologically modern humans have roamed the Earth for some 300,000 years. Yet what we refer to as history dwells on the past 5,000 years or so, since writing was invented in ancient Sumer. Prehistory—what took place before then—was largely the subject of speculation until recently. But advances in...
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You may have the impression that Winston Churchill stood alone in warning England of the rising Nazi menace. Many histories of the period paint that picture. But it’s not accurate. In fact, a group of younger Conservative MPs were vocal opponents of the Tory Establishment’s policy of...
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Three decades ago an American historian named David Christian who was teaching at an Australian university at the time offered a new perspective on world history. His unique take on the subject took the discipline far beyond the limits of the written word. Calling it Big History, Christian started...
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Since early in the 19th century, the men who rule Russia have relied on secret intelligence to preserve their hold on power. Tsar Nicholas I started it all in 1826. The Third Section, which he founded then, grew and morphed over the years, changing names and broadening its mission. But for most of...
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Historians usually credit President Theodore Roosevelt with launching the United States as an imperial power. But no president did more to establish the country as a power to be reckoned with than Thomas Jefferson. In 1803, he took advantage of the turmoil unleashed by Napoleon Bonaparte to buy...
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Here are 20 nonfiction books that present a broad overview of World War II and the factors that led up to it. The list does not fully reflect the war’s global dimensions. It’s biased toward an American, British, and French point of view.
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From its early days following World War I, what Hitler later renamed the Nazi Party had a powerful political sponsor behind the scenes: the Thule Society. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw notes that the organization’s “membership list … reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi...
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Any American youngster past the age of 12 has learned that around the turn of the 20th century our country’s politics took a sharp turn to the left with the advent of the Progressive Movement. And one man above all embodies that movement: Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, a species of...
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On a hill named Mount Herzl in Jerusalem lies Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Within this moving memorial to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust lie a synagogue, a children’s museum, and research facilities as well as a garden commemorating the Righteous Among...
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When I was born in 1941, about six months before the United States entered World War II, the world’s three largest cities were New York, Tokyo, and London (which had been #2 before the Blitz). None of the three housed even close to 10 million people. As of 2025, the three largest are...
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A review of Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre. ★★★★☆. How British intelligence, working through six European secret agents, misled the Germans about the date and place of the Normandy invasion and helped make its success possible.
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When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think “Normandy.” After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces. Not to...
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The world is divided between tea drinkers and coffee drinkers. Google Gemini says, “Tea is overwhelmingly preferred in most of Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe (e.g., UK, Turkey). Coffee is the preferred hot beverage in the Nordics, Brazil, Canada, and parts of Europe.” But in its...
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Spies sent from Japan helped set the stage for the attack on Pearl Harbor. That’s what I learned in reading about the event over the years. But what none of these accounts revealed was that Nazi spies in Hawaii played at least an equally important role in guiding the Japanese Imperial Navy...
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Three-quarters of a century ago, the United States embarked on a war on the other side of the globe that almost never enters the consciousness of living Americans today. President Harry Truman’s decision to undertake this “police action,” as he termed it. proved to be a strategic...
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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.