Memoirs are not my thing. I rarely read them unless I’m heavily invested in the author, either as an historical figure who can cast light on events I want to understand better, or as a writer whose work I love. The latter explains why I couldn’t wait to read Gary Shteyngart’s...
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Jessica Mitford was one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, and perhaps of any century. Her books, most famously The American Way of Death, eviscerated the American funeral industry, our prison system, and obstetrical care in the United States. But to those in Britain, where she was born in...
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He served our country for eighteen years, the longest-running, highest-ranking CIA asset in the history of the Cold War. He was active as a spy for the United States during the most intense years of the Cold War, from 1961 to 1980. And by then his “briefing transcripts and photocopies of...
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For thousands of years the Han people who settled China’s heartland around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers have contended with people of other ethnicities on what is now the nation’s periphery. For extended periods, marauders from that region—Mongolians, Manchurians, and Muslim Turkic...
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Name just about any billionaire in the tech industry, and Kara Swisher is sure to know him. In fact, she’s probably interviewed him several times onstage at her events or her podcasts or for her New York Times column, the Wall Street Journal, or one of the other publications she’s...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes You might pick up Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries, expecting a confessional, a mea culpa. I did. But that’s not the book she wrote. As Nguyen makes clear at the outset, “I never became a true believer and cannot profess to be one.”...
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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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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes 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...
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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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...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.