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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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God bless Peter Bernstein, may he rest in peace. No one else could make arcane and seemingly dull topics (e.g. the history of gold or of statistics) so fascinating and accessible. In 2009, the year of Bernstein’s death, the celebrated academic economist Niall Ferguson published a bestseller, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of…
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The central thesis of this book is that the gold standard, “far from being synonymous with stability, [was] itself … the principal threat to financial stability and economic prosperity between the wars.” Paradoxically, the prevailing conventional wisdom at the time was that the opposite was true: only gold could achieve stability and growth. UC Berkeley…
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British ancient historian Michael Grant is a legend of sorts, although I’m sure that plenty of classically trained Roman historians shutter at that appellation. Here, with “The Twelve Caesars,” originally published in 1975, he seeks to deliver to a modern audience in plain English and shorn of contemporary prejudice the men who ruled Rome from…
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The city of Constantinople was the greatest defensive structure of the medieval world. In the course of its 1,123 year history up to the year 1453 it had been besieged 23 times, and only once successfully, ironically by the Christian knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Muslim armies made only a handful of attempts,…
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I took a fantastic cultural exchange trip to Cuba in November 2015. In preparation for the trip I read a variety of books about Cuba: biographies, memoirs, novels and histories. “Barardi,” by Tom Gjelten of NPR fame, was probably the single best introduction to the island’s history and contemporary affairs. The author’s central point is…
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McDonald’s will always have a special place in my heart, even though I rarely eat there these days. A happy meal was a treasured treat when I was a kid and my first real job was working the drive-in window at a local McDonald’s. “McDonald’s: Behind the Arches” by John Love is an absorbing and…
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Unfortunately, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as thorny, intractable and relevant in 2016 as it was thirty-plus years ago when the civil war in Beirut dominated the headlines. This page-turner of a book, “The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames” by Kai Bird is a fabulous view into the reality of late twentieth…
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“Influenza killed more people in [1918] than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in 24-weeks than AIDS has killed in 24-years.” Those are some pretty sobering statistics. John Barry takes an oddly forgotten moment in world history and makes it comes to life in this thorough,…
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I love Teddy Roosevelt (full disclosure), and had read several academic biographies about him before picking up Candice Millard’s “The River of Doubt,” her popular narrative on the former president’s generally forgotten 1914 expedition in the Amazon. I’m glad I did, as Millard delivers a fast-paced and engaging history of a truly remarkable event in…
What's Tim Reading Now? 