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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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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…
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I am a Navy reservist and served as one of the primary economic development officers at NATO’s Regional Command – South headquarters in Kandahar from September 2009 to September 2010. Thus it was with more than passing interest that I read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s recent journalistic expose, “Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan,”…
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Few people remember the name Thomas Hutchinson today, but he was once the most hated man in America. And, if Bernard Bailyn, one of the most distinguished historians of revolutionary America, is to be believed, he is also one of the most misunderstood and wrongfully maligned men in American history. Several notable pieces seek to…
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David Hackett Fischer writes delightful books. He expertly combines the breezy readability of a master popular historian with the professional craftsmanship and deep primary research of a top rate academic. The end result is a narrative that is at once a dazzling adventure tale and a groundbreaking piece of historiography. The adventure tale aspect of…
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“The Spirit of ’76” has many positive connotations in contemporary America: liberty, freedom, and bravery foremost among them. Archibald Willard’s 19th century painting of the same name – depicting three ragged but steely-eyed and steadily advancing American soldiers…a fifer, a drummer and a flag bearer – remains an enduring symbol of national pride and power.…
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A century before the campaign to support Darfur and the anti-Apartheid struggle of the 1980s there was the Congo, an international humanitarian movement propelled by celebrity endorsements (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain) and stoked by graphic images of the atrocities that happened there, which horrified and outraged and inspired action. Adam Hochschild tells…
What's Tim Reading Now? 