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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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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.”…
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Few Americans know much about Sri Lanka. I was one of them until I read this book. I decided it was time to learn more after I was named to the president’s leadership council of a prominent Asian-focused non-governmental development foundation and then was invited to visit and assess the country operations in Sri Lanka,…
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I so wanted to be won over by this book by the brilliant Indian economist, Amartya Sen. His central thesis is simple and compelling: “…the basic idea that enhancement of human freedom is both the main object and the primary means of development.” However, the empirical evidence he musters to support his case is often…
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