Category: Pop History

In 1879 Dr. James Murray, editor in chief of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), published an open invitation calling for volunteers to read rare books and collect quotations for use in the dictionary. Thousands of participants signed up. It was a sort of nineteenth century form of Wikipedia. The dictionary would take many decades to…

What accounts for stupendous success in life? Is it talent or luck or hard work? It’s probably a combination of all three, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 bestseller, “Outliers: The Story of Success.” Gladwell lumps the reasons for success into three broad buckets. First is “luck” or perhaps what we today might call…

Laura Hillenbrand sure knows how to pick a story to tell. I think she’s only published two books in the past twenty years – “Seabiscuit” (1999) and “Unbroken” (2010) – but both have been mindboggling hits, selling over 13 million copies worldwide. However, reading “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,”…

Wharton professor Adam Grant has carved out a respectable niche in the space between academic behavioral economics and pop business management. I had heard him on various podcasts over the years, but I had never read any of his material. I found “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” (2016) to be pretty disappointing. My disappointment…

Malcolm Gladwell has had tremendous commercial success following a relatively simple formula: Ask an interesting question and then provide an unusual or unorthodox response through a variety of colorful vignettes. Many of his books have become mega hits (Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers) and I have become a huge fan. Thus, I was surprised when…

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the most distinguished presidential historians of the past fifty years. Her extended profiles of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson have all been best sellers; some have even won the Pulitzer Prize. In “Leadership in Turbulent Times” (2018), Goodwin seems to traverse from the Harvard history…

A century ago “Teapot Dome” made headlines from coast to coast for almost a decade.  Today, only the most dedicated political junkies remember what it was all about.  In “The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country” (2008) Laton McCartney seeks to bring the largest…

The best part about writing a memoir is you get to be the hero of your own story. And believe me, Bill Browder is the hero of “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice” (2013). But is Browder a hero? Some hedge fund titan cum fearless Galahad…