All Posts
Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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For those looking for a tight, readable introduction on political life in Republican Rome there is no better place to start than Lily Ross Taylor’s 1949 classic, “Party Politics in the Age of Caesar.” She reviews a wide range of institutions and practices — from religion and the law courts to voting assemblies and political…
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There are several ways to read Andrew Krepinevich’s “The Army and Vietnam,” which was published in 1986 when many wounds from the Vietnam War were still raw. First, it can be read as a summary and general assessment of the decade long Army experience with counterinsurgency (COIN) in Southeast Asia. Second, it can be viewed…
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My in-laws were medical missionaries in north east Cameroon back in the late 1990s. They were urged to read this travelogue as a preparation for life in sub Saharan Africa. I read it for fun, mainly because after flipping through a few pages I realized that it was a lot like the blog I kept…
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Toward the end of the Cold War, three very different books were published within five years of each other that sought to explain the likely contours of the inchoate new world order emerging from the implosion of the communist bloc: David Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” 1989); Francis Fukuyama’s “The End…
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The author, James Schneider, is a professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. In the Preface and Acknowledgements in the advanced proof of “Guerrilla Leader” he hints that he sees T.E. Lawrence as an exemplar of the type of military officer the U.S. Army needs to cultivate in order to be successful…
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Imagine you’re sitting at a bar next to some co-worker you barely know who is drinking heavily and droning on about how awful his ex-wife is, a real lying, cheating, disingenuous old bag. After an hour or so you almost start to feel bad for the poor lady. Such is the case, I found, with…
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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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