Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Stories of the French Resistance crowd library shelves. They’re among the most popular books about World War II. But many give a misleading picture of reality. Only about 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during the five years of the...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes They ruled England (and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland from time to time) for more than three centuries. By my count, there were sixteen of them in all. They held sway, sometimes shakily, from 1154 to 1485. French in origin—their family’s roots lay in the...
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Estimated reading time: 11 minutes Anti-Nazi resistance movements emerged in every country in Occupied Europe, including Germany itself. Historians rate the most effective of them to have been in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there is little in print published in...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Part history, part memoir, part travelogue, Smoke and Ashes is the latest work by acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh. Grounded in the extensive research he conducted in writing his extraordinary Ibis Trilogy, this new history of opium traces the story of the...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes What most of us in the US know about Cuba revolves around three events. The Spanish-American War (“Remember the Maine” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders). The Bay of Pigs Invasion. And the Cuban Missile Crisis. But our two countries have a much...
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A review of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). There is persuasive evidence that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earlier generations of scholars had suspected.
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes For generations of boys and girls throughout the English-speaking world, British history comes across as one bloody king after another. And you might expect the same from The Shortest History of England, which weighs in at less than three hundred pages. But no....
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of World War II knows that the Soviet Union paid the greatest price for resisting the Nazis. Estimates of the country’s total dead range from 24 to 30 million. But fewer know that China’s losses in the war were...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes On December 10, 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed film about the hunt for Usama bin Laden, debuted in Los Angeles. The central figure is a CIA officer named Maya, who pursues traces of “UBL” for years until finally locating...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes As Heather Cox Richardson notes in the foreword to her new book, Democracy Awakening, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” And since that prospect faces us later this year, the story she tells of the decades-long...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes History books can be dull and difficult to read, but they don’t have to be—and David Grann’s Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder is proof positive. In The Wager, he’s woven the facts into an engrossing story that held my attention to the last...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes For a majority of Americans, the events of June 6, 1944 represent the most important battle of World War II. Of course, the landings on D-Day and the campaign for Normandy that followed during the months of June, July, and August involved far, far more troops than...
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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes On May 10, 1940, two historic events grabbed the world’s attention. Hitler’s Panzer armies broke through the Belgian and Dutch frontiers. And King George VI asked Winston Churchill to form a new government. To tell the story of the eighty days that...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Three times in US history a presidential election has brought the nation to the brink of civil war. In 2020, when Donald Trump attempted to remain in office after losing by seven million votes. In 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln actually did trigger the...
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Few observers of Russia today display insight to match Masha Gessen’s. Born and raised in Moscow, Gessen later in life returned and became a journalist there and Russia’s leading LGBT activist. And in The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Max Hastings has gained a reputation as one of Britain’s foremost military historians. Today, aged 77 as I write, he is best known as a commentator on television. But as a young man of 34 he wrote Bomber Command (1979) about the role of strategic bombing in...
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A century ago in Italy, fascism began taking hold in much of Europe. Within a decade, illiberal and authoritarian political parties had moved into the mainstream, most prominently in Germany and Spain as well as Italy, Hungary, Greece, and Austria. Soon, the governments they led propelled the...
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The editors of the New York Times are apt to regard it as the most influential newspaper in the world, and they’re probably right. Despite all the tumult in the business of disseminating the news since the advent of the World Wide Web, the Times now boasts 9.7 million subscribers. They...
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A review of 1493: Uncvovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). One after another, this brilliant book brushes away a host of cherished myths that have grown up in the shadows of history.
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History exerts a powerful force on the present. Why else would battles rage over the historical record around the world? In the United States, for example, some insist slavery was the central driver in our history, while others fight back fiercely. And in Russia, where the Putin regime seeks to...
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Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
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.
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.