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Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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Each year I choose a broad historical subject to immerse myself in and, if possible, come close to mastering. In 2024 it was the Italian Renaissance; the year before, the Industrial Revolution. In 2025 I turned to early colonial America. Of the dozen or so books I read – ranging from accounts of the Spanish…
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In Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022) historian Chris Miller delivers a comprehensive and urgent account of how the semiconductor has become the most critical – and contested – resource in the modern world. His central insight is that microchips are not merely the foundation of the digital economy but…
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“George III is one of the most tragic monarchs in British history, as well as one of the most underestimated and misunderstood.” So concludes Andrew Roberts in his sweeping, revisionist biography of the Hanoverian king who reigned for nearly sixty years, guiding Britain through the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars while…
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The title of this book says it all. Originally published in 1975, What Is Art History? by art historian Mark Roskill provides a lively and engaging introduction to the discipline. Organized into a series of short, richly illustrated chapters, the book explores the central questions, methods, and responsibilities that define the work of the art…
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Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was the quintessential Renaissance man, famously described by the nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt as the “universal man.” In Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (2000), historian Anthony Grafton places the great Florentine humanist into historical perspective while attempting to uncover the complex individual behind the carefully constructed public…
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Thomas Jefferson came to call America’s fourth presidential election the “Revolution of 1800.” Indeed, the showdown between Federalist incumbent John Adams and Republican Democrat challenger Jefferson was selected as a topic in the excellent “Pivotal Moments in American History” series edited by David Hackett Fischer and James McPherson. It marked the first peaceful transfer of…
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The Merchant of Prato (1957) by Iris Origo has long deserved its reputation as a modern classic of historical writing. I had the good fortune to read this remarkable book while traveling through Bologna in the spring of 2026, an ideal setting for Origo’s vivid reconstruction of late medieval Italy. At its center is the…
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Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006) is less a history of art than a forceful meditation on why certain artists still command our attention centuries after they lived. Schama’s core argument is that truly great art is not decorative, polite, or merely technically accomplished – it is disruptive. It shocks, unsettles, compels, and, at…
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At the heart of The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown (1971) is a focus on continuity. Rather than seeing a sharp break between classical antiquity and the medieval world, Brown emphasizes the persistence and evolution of institutions, ideas, and social structures. The Roman state did not simply vanish; it mutated, most notably in…
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In March 1785, Virginia planter George Mason traveled to George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon to discuss a matter of shared concern: fishing, taxation, and toll rights on the Potomac River. A royal charter issued by Charles I of England in 1632 had defined Maryland’s boundary as extending to the far bank of the river,…
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Mid-nineteenth-century Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois and presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas was known as the “Little Giant.” It seems to me that James Madison is far more deserving of that title. The principal architect of the U.S. Constitution, a driving force behind the Federalist Papers, a former Secretary of State, and a wartime president,…
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