All Posts
Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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The Erie Canal was the first “grand project” of the American republic, paving the way for other monumental national engineering achievements, from the transcontinental railroad and the Panama Canal to the Manhattan Project and Apollo mission. Peter Bernstein, a writer known more for his skill in making financial and monetary issues comprehensible to the mass…
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I certainly wouldn’t rank the late Stephen Ambrose as one of the best American historians of his generation, but he may very well be the best-selling. In “Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869,” he brings his skill at telling the human side of warfare to one of…
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If Jesus Christ is the greatest story ever told, I’d like to put my vote in for another “JC” as the second: Julius Caesar. And Adrian Goldsworthy tells that remarkable story marvelously well. I’ve read several other biographies on the great Roman general and statesman before (Fuller, Meier, Gelzer) and “Caesar: Life of a Colossus”…
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This is a book for a rather serious armchair Roman scholar or upper classman studying the ancient world or international relations more generally. While not a “popular” or narrative history, it succeeds remarkably well for what it is: a compilation of essays by some of the most distinguished Roman scholars in the world on a…
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“Forging Stalin’s Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation” came out in the late 1990s when interwar studies on military innovation were all the rage, much like case studies of counterinsurgency would be a decade later. Much has been written about the German, American, British and Japanese experience during the 1920 and 1930s…
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Few works of non-fiction have been as eagerly anticipated and commercially successful as Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs,” which hit bookstores a mere 13 days after the iconic tech leader succumbed to cancer in October 2011. Despite its blockbuster status, reviews were somewhat mixed, which (in my opinion) is inevitable when a biography appears on a…
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Vo Nguyen Giap died in Hanoi in 2013 at the ripe old age of 102. Given his arduous early military life in the bush followed by his decades long leadership in a brutal war for national independence, joisting continuously with firepower-rich foreign enemies and deadly internal political rivals, he at least deserves to be remembered…
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Bernard Fall was one of the great foreign war correspondents. A Frenchman of Austrian Jewish birth, he spent most of his adult life studying and teaching in the United States when not in Southeast Asia covering the Vietnamese communist war against the French and then the Americans. This book, the story of the epic siege…
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One of my first surprises was how little information there is available on Sri Lankan history, especially the quarter-century civil war that bled the country white. When I asked Sri Lankan-based staff from the foundation which books I should read before arriving they recommended novels, such as “Anil’s Ghost” and “The Legend of Pradeep Mathew.”…
What's Tim Reading Now? 