When you think about it, slaves in the American South during the 19th century spoke a different language from their masters. Whites could sometimes barely understand them, and the reverse must have proven true at times as well. So novelist Percival Everett turns this insight on its head in James,...
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The 10 books highlighted here may not be the very best novels written about World War II. But they are the best ones I’ve read and reviewed since January 2010. I’ve given every one of them a rating of ★★★★★. There’s a second list below that includes some four dozen runners-up. All are novels...
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A young Chinese man sold by his uncle to work in a San Francisco laundry. The film star Anna May Wong, who could never achieve the stardom she coveted. A young Chinese American man murdered by two drunken White men, mistaken for the Japanese who had “stolen” American jobs in the 1980s....
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Few remember them today, but in the 1930s there were Nazis in America. Lots of them. And tens of millions of Americans supported them in the depths of the Depression. The Silver Shirts. German-American Bund. Friends of the New Germany. And Father Charles Coughlin’s weekly pro-Nazi and...
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When most Americans think of revolution, our minds leap to Russia a century ago and the chaotic events that gave rise to the Soviet Union. But a century from now our great-grandchildren will likely think first of another revolution that is proving to be equally consequential in historical terms—if...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes The cover and the title of this peculiar novel suggest that its subject is J. Robert Oppenheimer and the long shadow he cast following the first nuclear weapons test at Los Alamos. In any case, that’s why I chose to read it. And I was disappointed, to say...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes The woman history knows as Mary Queen of Scots, the Catholic martyr, became Queen of Scotland six days after her birth in 1542. As a teenager, she was Queen Consort of France for two years. By the time she turned twenty-four, Mary had married three times,...
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A disproportionate share of the novels available in English about World War II celebrate the French Resistance. Of course, it’s true that the maquis helped pave the way for the Normandy Invasion. But most military historians consider their impact on the war to be slight at best. And, in...
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As Rachel Swart lies dying in 1986 after a long bout with cancer, she coaxes a promise from her husband, Manie. He agrees to deed to their long-suffering Black house servant, Salome, the house she’s been living in all her life. Their younger daughter, Amor, overhears the exchange and presses...
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Welcome to Kosawa. A village nestled in a lush valley somewhere in West Africa, Kosawa suffers from the singular ill fortune of sitting atop an oil field. For as long as the village elders can remember, ever since independence, an American oil company named Pexton has been tapping the oil. And...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, once famously defined a novel in which “something happens.” He even later wrote a novel with that title. (It wasn’t very good.) So, it’s reasonable for a reader to expect upon digging into a book-length...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Holocaust tales abound in books and film alike. There’s no end to the gripping stories torn from diaries, the recollections of aging survivors, or the imaginations of talented novelists. Amazon alone lists more than 10,000 books on the Holocaust. Of course,...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Two cataclysmic events a century ago brought a grim and violent end to the lives of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans. In the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33, the famine Josef Stalin engineered, five million people perished of starvation. And in the Second...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Working round the clock for sixteen days in October and early November 1943, a ragtag bunch of Belgian resisters staged one of the most audacious and innovative protests their Nazi overlords had ever experienced. No one blew up train tracks or assassinated an SS...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Measuring the World was a bestseller on its original publication in Germany, where it sold 2.3 million copies. And that was in a country with a population one-quarter the size of America’s. Though they’re unfamiliar to many English-speaking readers,...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes From a distance of ninety years, it’s difficult for many Americans to understand how Adolf Hitler could have come to power in such a highly advanced and cultured country as Germany. And at the same time, many of us wonder why, with Hitler’s true...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes For nearly fifteen hundred years Europeans regarded the Roman-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (100-170) as the ultimate authority on humanity’s understanding of the universe. He viewed the Earth as the center of the universe. The moon, the planets, the...
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Here’s a Western that’s more Deadwood than Gunsmoke. It had to be: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And the panjandrums who manage that process aren’t known to show favor to run-of-the-mill genre writing. The Sisters brothers of the...
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It’s one of the oddest Holocaust stories I’ve ever come across, but one that was exceedingly popular. More than 500 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Translated into 63 languages and selling 17 million copies. The Book Thief was an international phenomenon,...
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A review of The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A brilliant young girl, daughter of a Rumanian-Jewish rug merchant, becomes an adviser to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the age of 8 in 1880s Istanbul.
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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.
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.