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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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Succinctly put, I loved this book. Ron Chernow’s “Titan” is more than a great business biography; it is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Although Standard Oil and the rise of big business in America clearly play a central role, this book is first and foremost about John D. Rockefeller: his convictions, his…
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A decade ago, the defense policy community was a buzz about an emerging “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) – a discontinuous change in the nature of warfare generated by the information revolution whose potential was so clearly demonstrated by the overwhelming advantage that precision guided munitions and operational awareness conferred to US forces in the…
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“The Grand Strategy of Philip II” is a rare book. On the one hand, it is a convincing scholarly reassessment of Spanish imperial policy during the pivotal late 16th century. In that sense, the book is written to the high standards of the academy: exhaustive primary research – much of it in the original Spanish,…
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The early twentieth century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski studied the yam-based culture of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. Villagers conspicuously displayed their yam harvest in front of their huts as a sign of wealth, but also power and prestige. At roughly the same time Norwegian-American economist Thorsten Veblen famously argued that people in the…
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For most people the Renaissance is synonymous with art; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Duerer are the names that define the age. Lisa Jardine, the late Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University, argues in “Worldly Goods” (1996) that the art-objects associated with the Renaissance were, in fact, the fabulous by-products of an increasingly…
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To begin with, let’s start at the end: lithium works. If you suffer from bipolar disorder and/or persistent suicidal ideation, there is no better prophylactic treatment than lithium. It is, as Brown likes to remind his readers, “the gold standard.” It is estimated that lithium has saved the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars…
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In 2015, it was reported that the Large Hadron Collider could disprove the Big Bang Theory. Imagine what that could mean to the tenured professors of physics and astronomy at MIT and CalTech who have made their professional careers espousing the Big Bang Theory?! Decades of research, countless peer-reviewed articles, dozens of major conference presentations,…
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Carl von Clausewitz’s masterpiece “On War” was published posthumously in Prussia in the 1830s. Arguably the most thoughtful and influential treatise on warfare ever written, his impact on the English-speaking world, especially the United States, was very slow in coming. Author Christopher Bassford claims this was due to several reasons. First, “On War” wasn’t available…
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In 483 BC, the statesmen Themistocles led the construction of the Athenian fleet, stating, “I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great.” Some 2,500 years later, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz attempted a similar path for the upstart German nation, like…
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