Most Americans came alive to the reality of polarization in our politics only recently. In the 1990s at the earliest, with the advent of Fox News and Newt Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners partisanship. But a remarkable book published in 2011 explained with faultless logic that the polarization...
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We study history to learn where we’ve come from and how we got to where we are. But we’re dependent on the politicians, scholars, and commentators to deliver an active account of the past. And few world leaders in our planet’s history have been more dramatically caricatured than...
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Truth to tell, I don’t know whether the 26 books I’ve listed below are, in fact, the “best” books of the year 2025. All I know is that they’re the best books I’ve read and reviewed during the past 12 months. In fact, a few of them were published in earlier years. I just didn’t discover them until...
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Truth to tell, I don’t know whether the 26 books I’ve listed below are, in fact, the “best” books of the year 2025. All I know is that they’re the best books I’ve read and reviewed during the past 12 months. In fact, a few of them were published in earlier years. I just didn’t discover them until...
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You’ve probably never heard her name before. But if you fly frequently she may have saved your life. Her name was Roxie Laybourne, and she was of all unlikely things the world’s first forensic ornithologist. In 1960, when Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crashed on takeoff from Logan...
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For most Americans, the enduring image of World War II in the Philippines is the iconic shot of General Douglas MacArthur wading onto the shore of Leyte Island on October 20, 1944. The photo was posed, part of the general’s public relations campaign to grab headlines at home. But MacArthur...
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Chances are slim that you can read or understand spoken Russian, Swedish, or Hindi. But, believe it or not, English is related to all three languages—and more than 400 others. They’re all descendants of a single ancient language linguists call Proto-Indo-European. “Proto” was the...
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Even if your knowledge of English history is sketchy at best, you’re likely to have heard of the Norman Conquest, the Black Death . . . and the Wars of the Roses. You may then be surprised to learn, as Dan Jones informs us in his account of that famous conflict, that the so-called...
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In 1998, three ambitious Silicon Valley entrepreneurs established a startup called PayPal. These three hustlers—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek—later merged with Elon Musk’s company and enlisted eight or nine others. Together, they became the PayPal Mafia. The company survived the...
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Sixteen million people served in the United States armed forces during World War II. But only about one in five experienced direct combat. And of those a much smaller number bore the brunt of the fighting on the front lines in daily contact with the enemy. Even among them a small fraction...
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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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You might have wondered, as I have, how China could become so prosperous and powerful in less than half a century since Deng Hsiao-ping launched what I might call the Second Chinese Revolution. Certainly, the centralized power of the Communist Party has played a pivotal role. Like the Soviet Union...
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Amazon lists more than 3,000 books about Donald Trump, and I feel as though I’ve read most of them. (Well, at least 23, anyway.) So, why do we need yet another one? Of course, he’s now well into his second term, and a lot has happened since January 20, 2025. A whole lot. So...
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Few agencies of the US Government resisted women’s liberation and the civil rights movement as long or as fiercely as the CIA. Born in the macho exploits of the OSS in World War II, an old boys’ network continued to direct the country’s premier spy service well into the 1980s. Of...
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A review of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Chronicles the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, only of only three people ever known to have escaped from a North Korean labor camp and made it to the West. A harrowing account of one of the world’s most widespread and most egregious human rights violations.
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In 1860, when civil war erupted, the federal government was a mere shadow of what it has become today. The federal budget was about $63 million, only about $2.5 billion in 2025 dollars. That compares to the $6.6 trillion, or $6,600 billion, the government spent in the the past year. And only about...
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For three seasons early in this century, HBO aired Deadwood, which won more than two dozen Emmy Awards. The series starred Timothy Olyphant as businessman and lawman Seth Bullock and Ian McShane as Al Swearengen, the violent criminal proprietor of a saloon and brothel. Other leading characters...
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During the six years of World War II in Europe, Nazi officials and their collaborators looted some 650,000 works of art. Competing Nazi bureaucracies sent agents throughout the Continent, plundering museums and private Jewish-held collections alike. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who was...
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Mark Twain satirized the period as the Gilded Age, suggesting that an overlay of gold plating hid the seamy reality underneath. Later, historians fixed the term to the years from the late 1870s to the late 1890s. Then, America emerged from the devastation of the Civil War to become the...
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When future historians tally the most consequential revolutionary movements of the modern era, the choices will be obvious. The Russian Revolution re-set the balance of power almost throughout the 20th century. In China, the Communists set the world’s most populous nation on a dramatic new...
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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.