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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Six months after fanatical Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran, holding 52 Americans hostage, another group invaded the Iranian Embassy in London. This kicked off a tense six-day standoff between London police and hostage-takers that dominated the news in Britain and the Continent....
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Version 1.0.0 Millions of words have been published in English about the French Resistance. Readers, especially American readers, can get the impression that the French effort to resist the Nazis was the best (or even the only one) in Europe. But that’s not true. Underground armies in...
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At least four books are in print under the title They Fought Alone. The best-known was the work of Col. Maurice Buckmaster, who led the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from March 1941 to the end of World War II. Journalist and broadcaster Charles Glass, author of the most...
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If you read a lot about World War II, you’ll come across not one but several battles mentioned as the “turning point.” Focusing only on Europe, five events surface. Moscow (January 1942). Stalingrad (February 1943). Kursk (August 1943). Operation Bagration (August 1944). And, of...
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When Winston Churchill launched the storied Special Operations Executive (SOE) on June 13, 1940, just a month had passed since he moved into 10 Downing Street. Yet France had fallen to Hitler’s minions and the British Expeditionary Force had barely escaped annihilation at Dunkirk. But the...
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The concept of grand strategy is unfamiliar outside military and diplomatic circles. But it’s impossible to understand how wars are won and lost without an appreciation of the concept. John Lewis Gaddis, the author of this book, offers the approach taken by most scholars in the field. To...
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Remarkably, year after year, new books keep hitting the shelves about the Third Reich. After all, the whole misbegotten enterprise came to a bloody end nearly 80 years ago. Of course, some are mere knockoffs, rearranging what others have written in the past. But new primary sources keep appearing....
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Most Americans, and no doubt many in Britain, immediately fasten on the label Dark Ages when the Middle Ages come to mind. The term has fallen out of favor with many historians, who have delved into the history of the period from roughly 500 to 1500 and discovered signs of change that don’t...
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Most of us, at least in the United States, learned a little about the famous “Monkey Trial” early in our schooling. It was, in fact, a milestone in the national debate over whether science or religion should dominate in considering Charles Darwin’s monumental breakthrough in our...
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If you’ve been reading my reviews for very long, you’re aware that the World War II era holds special fascination for me. This might have something to do with the fact that I was born then—in fact, about six months before the USA entered the war. Or maybe it’s just because it all...
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Military historians point to Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) as the first modern Special Forces. Formed in Egypt in 1941 by David Stirling as a paratroop unit, the SAS later spawned the Special Boat Service (SBS) for maritime operations. Both organizations sometimes traded personnel with...
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Few people have any idea how many new books there are every year. According to Steven Piersanti, Founder and Senior Editor at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, quoting a 2023 report in Publishers Weekly, 2.3 million books were self-published in the US in 2021. And a recent industry estimate is that each...
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William Randolph Hearst thundered into New York City in 1895, intent on making history with a brash new approach to writing and selling newspapers. The following year he bought the ailing New York Evening Journal to compete with his old mentor, Joseph Pulitzer, who published the city’s...
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No, in spite of this book’s title, it’s not a story about a Russian spy in the CIA’s Moscow Station. It’s something much more engaging—an account of a long-running counterespionage investigation into KGB surveillance technology at the US Embassy in Moscow. An investigation...
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A century ago the United States government shut down the fledgling spy service the Wilson Administration had established to help wage the Great War. And America was out of the espionage business until 1942, when FDR authorized the formation of the OSS. Today, the American intelligence community...
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Historians frequently write of “the Long Nineteenth Century” from 1789 to 1914. In The First World War, the acclaimed military historian John Keegan shows how dramatically the events of 1914 to 1918 capped that period. The “Great War” led to the dismemberment of the four...
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Before the dawn of the Common Era two thousand years ago, Julius Caesar gave the land its name, Germania. But it was nineteen hundred years before the land became a country. That happened only in 1871 when the ruthless and brilliant Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck united twenty-five...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Scan any list of the physicists, chemists, and other top scientists who created the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. What you’ll find there, one after another, are the names of Europeans who’d fled the Nazis in the 1930s. They dominate the...
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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.