Author: Tim Graczewski
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Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (2017) by Kenneth Whyte
Herbert Hoover is mainly remembered today for his disastrous single term as president at the start of the Great Depression. That is unfortunate, as he is undoubtedly one of the most talented men of his generation and led a life jam-packed with memorable feats and achievements. In “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” Kenneth…
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The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (2018) by Max Boot
When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Edward Lansdale was a 38-year-old advertising executive in San Francisco with a wife and two young children with no background or education in national security or defense policy. Amazingly, within twenty years he would emerge as the country’s leading expert on counter-insurgency. Author Max Boot…
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The Russian Revolution (1990) by Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes was a prominent scholar of Russian history at Harvard for nearly half a century. Born in Poland in 1923, he was a virulent anti-communist and served in the Reagan administration National Security Council in the early 1980s. The fact that he dedicates “The Russian Revolution” to “the victims” tells you all you need…
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War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (2013) by Carter Malkasian
I deployed to southern Afghanistan in late 2009, roughly the same time that Carter Malkasian arrived as the lead political officer in Garmser in Helmand Province. It was just the beginning of the so-called “Obama Surge” into Afghanistan and the situation in many areas in southern Afghanistan – Helmand Province in particular – was bleak.…
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Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2013) by Scott Anderson
The story of T.E. Lawrence and the Sykes-Picot agreement has been told many times before. Nowhere perhaps better than David Fromkin’s award-winning “A Peace to End All Peace.” Scott Anderson tackles the topic from an interesting angle. He tells the story in narrative form following four inter-related characters: T.E. Lawrence; the Jewish spy-leader, Aaron Aaronsohn;…
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Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012) by Steve Coll
What a difference a few years make! When “Private Empire” was first published in 2013, ExxonMobil was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, a quarter-trillion-dollar behemoth, delivering jaw-dropping quarterly profit statements that late night talk show hosts found as monologue fodder. By the dawn of 2020, however, the world had changed whereas…
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1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (2004) by Adam Zamoyski
Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 is legendary – and rightfully so. All I knew about it before reading Adam Zamoyski’s “Moscow, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March” was that the Russian winter defeated Napoleon’s Grand Armee. I had no idea how horrific the whole experience was for soldiers and civilians, alike, nor the historical context in which…
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The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2012) by David McCullough
God bless David McCullough. With seeming effortlessness he does what most every historian hopes to achieve – recreate the life and times of the distant past. I was not prepared to like this book. How could anyone write over four hundred pages chronicling the experience of Americans in nineteenth century Paris and make it somehow…
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George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011) by John Lewis Gaddis
According to no less an authority than Henry Kissinger: “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” John Lewis Gaddis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the great twentieth century statesman is absolutely brilliant, start to finish. Weighing in at nearly 700 pages, no aspect of…
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