Before his death in 2009, the prolific detective novelist Stuart Kaminsky wrote 16 police procedurals featuring a Moscow investigator named Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. The books span the years 1981 to 2008. They encompass the final years of Communist rule and the first two tumultuous decades that...
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Leonard Summers; his wife, Martha; and son, Bernard, are moving into a remote cabin in Minnesota. But his name isn’t Leonard Summers. It’s Leonid Sokolov. And “he was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency,” Lucas Davenport explains to fellow US...
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Here’s a story that only a gifted writer could successfully pull off. The key figures could hardly figure as principals in anyone else’s novels. The rootless young men in a depressed small town who’ve formed a would-be right-wing militia. Four Russian biological warfare...
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The independence of Chief Inspector Rostnikov’s cozy little squad is on the line. “The Office of Special Investigations was at the very bottom of the Moscow police force. The Office had been created solely as a receptacle in which to dump unsolvable and politically sensitive cases...
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The Romanovs: 1613–1918 chronicles the 300-year rise and fall of the dynasty, detailing how 20 tsars and tsarinas transformed Russia into a massive empire. Ruthless autocracy, immense territorial expansion, and extreme personal power struggles characterized their reign. Historian Simon Sebag...
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Nineteen seventeen was a watershed year in world history. It marked the arrival of the first American troops on the Western Front in World War I, laying the groundwork for victory the following year. The dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian Empires would soon follow....
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No one is still alive with any adult memory of World War I, which ended a century ago. So when we think of the events that have shaped the world we live in today it’s likely World War II looms large. But its antecedent three decades earlier may have had greater long-term impact. The...
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When the Soviet Union collapsed the day after Christmas in 1991, security officials in the West faced a new nuclear nightmare. Tons of nuclear fuel had accumulated in the country’s far-flung reactors and military bases—and some of that fuel might make its way to terrorists, sold by...
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When we first met Simon Sharman in Charles Beaumont’s explosive debut, A Spy Alone, he was a former MI6 officer employed at a private British intelligence service. Working in tandem with an Oxford academic named Sarah du Cane, who was influential at 10 Downing Street, he exposed a high-level...
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Over the course of two decades late in the 18th century, the neighbors of what was then called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth progressively seized portions of its territory on three occasions. History records those actions as the three Partitions of Poland. The result was to eliminate...
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In the years following World War II, the emerging Cold War took on global dimensions. Then Britain, still clung on to its far-flung empire,. And the conflict with the Soviet Union played itself out not just at home and in Eastern Europe but throughout its possessions in Africa, Asia, and Latin...
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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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For the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 signaled a welcome shift in global power dynamics. Americans celebrated it as the end of the Cold War and a victory for the hardliner Ronald Reagan. But for the 289 million people of the USSR, the eruption of hope that came with the shift soon...
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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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Work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway on March 9, 1891. Then, Tsar Alexander III still ruled the Russian Empire. But when he died at the age of 49 three years later, his feckless son Nicholas II ascended to the Imperial Throne. And at immense expense, Nicholas realized his father’s dream...
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From 1986 to 2001, the massive Russian space station Mir (“peace”) hurtled around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, circling the planet approximately every hour and a half. Usually, three cosmonauts lived aboard for periods lasting from several months to over a year. Cosmonaut...
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Brace yourself. Much of what you believe about why the Allies won World War II may not be true. British historian Richard Overy challenges the received wisdom in his eye-opening revisionist interpretation of the six-year ordeal, titled simply Why the Allies Won. For most historians, that question...
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For some unfathomable reason, Antony Beevor is one of Britain’s most popular and widely read military historians. It’s true that he knows a great deal about military matters. He’s a former army officer and teaches at military staff colleges in Britain, the US, and other...
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Among the most momentous events in world history, World War I stands out for the breadth and depth of its consequences. The fighting was a principal cause of the Russian Revolution. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires disintegrated, their monarchs deposed. The United States...
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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.