Since the advent of the Second World War more than eighty years ago, spies have stripped the United States of a sobering volume of critical, top-secret information that threatens our security. Name a few names, and students of espionage will immediately recognize the spy scandals they caused....
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Amazon lists some 2,000 Holocaust memoirs, among them Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958), Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), and, of course, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947). But from an historical perspective, the most significant of these...
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Unless you’re old enough to remember the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, and the Yippies, you can’t imagine the sheer sense of unlimited possibility felt by many young Americans in the closing years of the 1960s and the beginning of the 70s. For hundreds of thousands,...
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The most important thing I can tell you about the Mel Brooks memoir, All About Me!, is simply put. It took me twice as long to read the book as it otherwise would have because I spent so much time laughing my head off. Mel Brooks may not be the funniest man alive, but he’s certainly near the...
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You might expect a political memoir to offer up a smorgasbord of self-justification and score-settling. Many such autobiographical works are that and little more. But that is most assuredly not the case with Barack Obama’s A Promised Land. In this first of two planned volumes, the...
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Memoirs and autobiographies are often about score-settling. But that’s not the case with Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s insightful and revealing account of her years working for three tech startups in Silicon Valley. You might expect to know at least the names of the companies where she...
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In August 1977, a Ukrainian immigrant named John Demjanjuk (1920-2012) living near Cleveland, Ohio was accused by Holocaust survivors of being the notorious guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka Nazi death camp. He was extradited to Israel and eventually convicted of war crimes and...
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Few countries on Earth are more isolated than North Korea. The term “hermetically sealed” is often applied. And as a result few first-hand accounts of life in the hermit kingdom of the Kim Dynasty have made it into print in the West. Of those that have appeared in the United States,...
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Once upon a time, in the dim recesses of the twentieth century, I learned the rules of spelling and grammar from my mother (a former English teacher) and a succession of prim ladies in the public school system of Lima, Ohio. It was all cut and dried, as rules tend to be. Rules were rules. There...
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Most of us know what little we know about the work of the CIA from novels. Of course, much of that, perhaps most of it, is fanciful. Former CIA officers do write memoirs from time to time, but often, as the Washington Post noted (June 4, 2012), they write to “settle scores about...
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From 1964 to 1982, former Marine fighter pilot Frank McCloy served under deep cover in the CIA in Madrid, Delhi, Tokyo, and Caracas. But he was far from alone. His wife, Lillian, and three young children shared the experience with him of culture shock, life-threatening illness, and danger from...
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Eve Jaretzki was 16 years old when she learned she was the great-great-granddaughter of Prince August of Prussia, the fabulously wealthy Warrior Prince who had defeated Napoleon. It was 1940. Six years earlier, her parents had fled from Nazi Germany and relocated the family to Hampstead, near...
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If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to live in the White House, you can get a pretty good idea from the Michelle Obama memoir, Becoming. Assuming you ever had any fantasies about becoming President of the United States, this book may drive the thought from your mind. Life in the...
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If you grew up in a comfortable middle-class home, as I did, you may be shocked by Tara Westover’s Educated, an account of her childhood and adolescence in a Mormon survivalist family in Idaho. I was. Again and again, I found my jaw dropping at the cruelty, ignorance, and superstition...
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Far too frequently, memoirs are nakedly self-justifying. Often so much so that even a casual reader can pick up on the author’s agenda without difficulty. This is especially true of memoirs by politicians and entertainers. In fact, a large proportion of those books about politics and entertainment...
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I rarely read political memoirs, because so often they’re one-sidedly partisan and self-serving. They tend to lack any sense of balance. For example, though I didn’t read Hillary Clinton’s book about the 2016 election, I saw enough reviews to know that its primary purpose was to...
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She was born Haneczka Rose in 1935 in Kraków, the youngest of three children of a well-to-do Polish-Jewish family. She became Anna Rozak at the age of six, when her parents sent her into hiding with a Catholic family to evade capture by the Gestapo. In England at the end of the Second World War,...
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If you’re like most Americans, chances are you know little or nothing about Indonesia. Yet that island nation is the world’s fourth largest by population (after China, India, and the USA) and fifteenth largest by land area (just after Mexico). It also is home to the world’s...
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In the closing scene of the classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Major T. J. “King” Kong straddles a nuclear bomb as it soars down onto the Soviet Union while the World War II hit song We’ll Meet Again blares in the background....
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I carry the words; I pass them on. I listen to the stories and tell them again.” Thus writes Berkeley novelist and poet Elizabeth Rosner in her deeply moving new memoir, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. The stories are the recollections of Rosner’s...
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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.