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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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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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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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