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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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Few figures in twentieth century American history cast a longer shadow than Douglas MacArthur. Fewer still have seen their legacy sink so inexorably over the years. But there was more to the man than the pompous, dangerous, ego maniacal insubordinate, as he has become known to history, as the late William Manchester demonstrates in this…
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First published over a half century ago, the Morgans’ “The Stamp Act Crisis” is still the most well-rounded and penetrating account of the political upheaval of 1764 to 1766 that essentially put the American Revolution in motion. The authors combine the very best of narrative history, with a strong focus on some of the most…
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First published in 1979, David Stockton’s The Gracchi is a scholarly, balanced and insightful analysis of the two Gracchi brothers, whose eventful — indeed revolutionary — tribunates set the course for the final Roman Revolution of Julius Caesar nearly a century later. Stockton’s book was published the same year as another significant work on the…
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A friend of mine working at the American embassy in Beijing sent me this book. It is six separate defector’s stories from North Korea, providing a glimpse into typical lives north of the 38th Parallel from the end of the Cold War, through the death of Kim Il-Sung and catastrophic famine of the late 1990s,…
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The first in a trio of insightful monographs on key decision points in the US war in Vietnam, “Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam”, which focuses on the Johnson administration’s actions in the fateful year of 1965, may be the best of the three. The material that Larry Berman covers has…
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Like most inhabitants of earth, I never gave much thought to intermodal shipping. It wasn’t until I served as an economic development officer in southern Afghanistan and began looking into ways we could more efficiently export the high value fruits and nuts grown locally to the lucrative markets of the Middle East that I discovered…
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In the opening essay in this multi-authored book, Craig Symonds wonders aloud if there is an antonym for the word synergy, a particular combination of elements that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Symonds suggests that such a word, the opposite of synergy, would apply well to describing the relationship between…
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Charles Andrews, writing in the early 1920s, thought that contemporary understanding and appreciation of the American Revolution was clouded by popular propaganda and national tendency for ancestor worship. This monograph, “The Colonial Background of the American Revolution,” seeks to reverse the general habit of trying to justify rather than explain, and the tendency by early…
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“The United States swaggered into the War of 1812 like a Kansas farm boy entering his first saloon. And, like that same innocent, wretchedly gagging down his first drink, the new nation was totally unprepared for the raw impact of all-out war.” So begins this no-holds-barred military history of one of the most purposeless, indecisive,…
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