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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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Half a century ago some of the nation’s leading Civil War era historians put together this collection of essays seeking to explain, from a variety of perspectives (economic, military, political, diplomatic), why the North prevailed in the epic contest of wills between the states. We have arrived at the sesquicentennial of the great conflict and…
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The distinguishing feature of this book is the massive data set that undergirds the surprisingly few and rather conventional-wisdom-affirming findings. The authors have aggregated literally centuries of price, exchange rate, debt, export, current account and real GDP statistics for sixty-six countries representing over 90% of global GDP, which is presented in a dizzying array of…
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This isn’t a book; it’s an education. And I can guarantee that if you’re a serious, committed, thoughtful reader the purchase price is but a tiny fraction of the value that Bernstein will deliver to you with “Against the Gods.” The following review may seem overly detailed and specific, wordy beyond measure, but that’s mainly…
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The conventional academic view of Rome during the Republic is that of small, all powerful aristocratic government. Fergus Millar turns that entire argument on its head in “The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic.” He says that too much focus has been put on the role of the patrician and noble class. Yes, family…
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Now in its sixth edition, “Mania, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises” was first published by Charles Kindleberger in 1978. How times have changed over those thirty plus years — at least that is the striking conclusion from this latest iteration of the enduring classic, which argues that the world of financial crises…
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Malcolm Gladwell has made a fortune writing books like this, stitching together a compelling and comprehensive narrative on phenomena like social virality (“Tipping Point”), deep understanding of subject matter (“Blink”) and exceptional performance (“Outliers”). Gladwell delivers virtually no original research in any of these books. But what he does with genius is make all the…
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About a decade ago, I undertook a personal project: read the best biography in print on each of the most illustrious (or notorious) Robber Barons. I read Chernow on Rockefeller (brilliant), Wall on Carnegie (very good), Strouse on Morgan (solid), and Klein on Gould (disappointment). I very much wanted to read something on Vanderbilt, but…
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“William Cooper’s Town” isn’t a great book – it’s three great books. As the author, Alan Taylor, spells out in the introduction, “‘William Cooper’s Town’ is a hybrid of three usually distinct genres: biography, social history, and literary analysis.” The first is a fascinating biography of an eighteenth century social climber and speculator, William Cooper.…
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Nikita Khushchev was an unlikely giant of the twentieth century. His improbable decades-long march to supreme leadership of a world girdling communist empire was matched only by his improbably well-orchestrated fall from power in 1964. The riddle that Tubman seeks to unwrap in this excellent single-volume biography is: How exactly did someone like Khrushchev, this…
What's Tim Reading Now? 