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...
Read More
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....
Read More
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....
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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....
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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....
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
...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.