Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Christopher Walters is a trauma surgeon in a place where life itself is traumatic. He carries the nominal rank of captain in the United States Army in southern Siberia. There, the Americans are attempting to hold firm on the Western Front in a war with the Novos,...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes A century ago, they called themselves anarchists. But we today would think of them as terrorists. After all, they had shocked the world again and again with their bombs and bullets. Anarchists had assassinated Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, Empress Elisabeth...
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When I was born, shortly before the United States entered World War II, the Great War of 1914 to 1918 was an active living memory for many adults. Today, a century after the last of the sixteen peace treaties ending the conflict was signed at Lausanne in 1923, almost no one remembers. We rely on...
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For most Americans and Europeans, the name Fiji conjures up images of golden beaches, lush jungle landscapes, and coconut palms waving in a gentle breeze. But until about a century ago, the island nation was the scene of one of the more distasteful practices of the British Empire. Then, tens of...
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British American author Jacqueline Winspear has gained wide readership for the seventeen novels in her Maisie Dobbs series. The books follow the evolving career of a young woman raised in poverty in London through two world wars and the troubled times between. A nurse at the front in the first...
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Someone famous probably urged us never to delve too deeply into the lives of our heroes since we’re so likely to become cruelly disappointed. And you may have held a vision of Lawrence as one of the few genuine heroes of the 20th Century—a vision nourished by David Lean’s 1962 film...
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Fair warning: although the headline promises the “best nonfiction of 2022,” what follows is not a list of the best published during the past year. Instead, I’ve chosen not to compete with any reviewers who may imply they’ve read the many thousands of nonfiction books published in...
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For three decades, the nation now known as Tanzania was a German colony. In 1891, the country and adjoining territory (including Rwanda and Burundi) became Deutsch-Ostafrika. But when Germany lost World War I, the British, Belgians, and Portuguese took over. The lion’s share was first a...
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Estimated reading time: 8 minutes On Sunday, October 9, 2022, the cover story in the New York Times Book Review featured Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight. Reviewer Thomas Meaney characterized the book as “masterly” and applauded its reminder that “there are other...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Harini Nagendra’s debut in crime fiction, The Bangalore Detectives Club, opens in the South Indian city of Bangalore in 1921. It’s a gripping historical murder mystery but also well worth reading for its close observation of class and caste dynamics in...
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A review of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). In this brilliant study of World War I, Adam Hochschild explores the historical forces at work when the 19th Century so tragically encountered the 20th. In that first truly global conflict, the military traditions of the past collided with the realities of life in an industrial age, with top British commanders stubbornly defending the lance, the sword, and the horse in favor of the machine gun and ordering millions of men to certain death against impenetrable barriers of barbed wire.
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Ken Follett traced the construction of a great medieval cathedral from the 11th to the 16th centuries in his monumental, four-book Kingsbridge series. In the Century Trilogy, he turned to the history of the two 20th-century world wars and the Depression between...
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This is not a detective story, despite the fact that it’s one in a series of historical novels about New Jersey’s first female deputy sheriff (and apparently the first anywhere to carry a gun). Nor is it a thriller or even especially suspenseful. Instead, Miss Kopp’s Midnight...
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One of the most spectacular intellectual achievements of recent centuries was the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The dictionary began in 1857 as a project of Britain’s Philological Society. But it was only in 1884, under the direction of Scottish lexicographer James Murray, when...
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The weight of history began crashing down on the British Raj in World War I, as these exceptionally well executed historical detective novels make abundantly clear. Victoria’s “jewel in the crown” had sent more than one million soldiers to fight for God and country—England, not...
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A century ago a pandemic disease far more lethal than COVID-19 killed an estimated fifty to one hundred million people around the world—as many as one out of every twenty people then alive. The 1918 flu epidemic erupted during a war that had already killed tens of millions and at a time when...
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You’re unlikely ever to have come across her name before, but you’ll be fascinated by the remarkable story Berkeley author Adam Hochschild tells about her life in his latest excursion into popular history. Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the most famous and influential people, women OR...
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Few Americans could find Lithuania on a map. Yet that little Baltic country has a long, proud history — in fact, for a time it was not little at all — and has borne witness to many of the seminal events of recent centuries. And Lithuanian-Canadian author Antanas Sileika cleverly picks the years...
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The cover of this remarkable book pictures the three principals who negotiated the Versailles Treaty ending World War I: David Lloyd George of England, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States. They’re all smiling. But when the treaty was eventually signed seven...
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In his second historical espionage novel featuring Christopher Marlowe Cobb, Robert Olen Butler has enlisted the war correspondent as a secret agent for the United States Secret Service. World War I is raging in Europe and the Middle East, and Cobb has been assigned to trail a German-American...
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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.