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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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Written in the “olden days” of the Internet (i.e. late 1990s), Randy Komisar’s “The Monk and the Riddle” is a classic with a timeless message: there’s a fundamental difference between passion and drive. The latter is what propels type A personalities to succeed at anything they undertake. The former is more visceral and personal; it…
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“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” This is how Ezra Vogel concludes his massive 700-page tome, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” Indeed, who else in history has…
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Long before he was a controversial commentator on NPR and then FOX News, Juan Williams was a distinguished chronicler of the US Civil Rights era. “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” was published in 1998, a half-decade after the legendary civil rights lawyer (but rather forgettable Supreme Court justice, according to this book) passed away at age…
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The paperback edition of “The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty” was eagerly anticipated. Well, by me, at least. I have spent the past year reading broadly on the topic of economic development. Sachs’s 2005 bestseller, “The End of Poverty,” is by far the most optimistic and prescriptive of the lot. He…
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Author Gerald Gunther was one of the country’s most prominent twentieth century legal scholars. He authored the authoritative constitutional law textbook and was widely regarded as most deserving of a Supreme Court justiceship, if the criteria were purely based on merit and intellectual gravitas. Gunther clerked for Learned Hand on the Second Court of Appeals…
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In the main, I found “Black Swan” to be terribly disappointing: long-winded, poorly structured, unnecessarily acerbic, often embarrassingly childish, but above all of limited practical application. Author Nassim Taleb launches a frontal assault on social scientists of all stripes, but unleashes particular venom at economists, especially Nobel Prize winners who’s work is based on Gaussian…
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Is Roger Crowley’s “Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Conquest for the Center of the World” a substantive and groundbreaking piece of sixteenth century history? No. Is it an engaging story wonderfully told? Absolutely. The author breaks the narrative into three equally weighted parts. The first sets…
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In late 2014, when I was reading this book (first published in 1986), Richard C. Hottelet, the last of the original “Murrow’s Boys,” died in Connecticut at the age of 97. There is so much about Edward R. Murrow’s story that feels old and distant – grainy black-and-white telecasts and lots of cigarette smoking –…
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Lots of popular history books claim to “read like a novel”; this one actually does. Author Candace Millard takes a random, Jeopardy!-Trivia-question event in American history (“He shot President Garfield in July 1881.” “Who is Charles Guiteau?”) and turns it into a delightful page-turning read. “Destiny of the Republic” likely isn’t great history in the…
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