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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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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) by Edward Baptist
The year 2014 witnessed the publication of two weighty historical works on the seemingly mundane subject of cotton: Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton” and Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told.” The former was better critically received, winning the prestigious Bancroft Prize and being named as a Pulitzer-Prize finalist; the latter arguably generated more…
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In 1417, at a remote monastery in what is today southern Germany, Poggio Bracciolini – a former apostolic secretary to the disgraced Pope John XXIII and a man renowned for his exquisite handwriting and command of classical Latin – pulled a dusty manuscript from the shelf of the monastic library. It was a long forgotten…
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I loved this book. In fact, Rich Cohen’s “The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King” just might make it into my non-fiction book Hall of Fame, an honored group of the best, most engaging pieces of history and biography that I’ve ever read. Why such high praise? Well,…
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Danny Meyer is a legend in the restaurant business. His bestselling business book, “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business,” should make him a lower deity in the realm of American business gurus. Beginning with the Union Square Café in 1985 and culminating (for now) with Shake Shack, which went public in…
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The early 1990s marked the first time that Genghis Khan and his empire – defunct since at least the mid-fourteenth century – could be studied in-depth. “The Secret History of the Mongols,” re-discovered in the early nineteenth century, had finally been translated, and the collapse of the Soviet Union had opened up the so-called Ikh…
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“Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order” by John Marszalek is military biography at its finest: lucidly written, thoroughly researched, admirably objective and offering penetrating insights into the subject’s motivations and foibles. There are three aspects to this book, all quite different, that made a lasting impression on me. First, to my surprise, Sherman’s tumultuous childhood…
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God only knows how many books have been written about the French Revolution. “The Coming of the French Revolution” by Georges Lefebvre, first published in 1967, is one of the few that has endured as a bona fide classic, regularly assigned as required reading as “the classical interpretation” of events from 1788-89 in university-level courses…
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I didn’t choose “The Killing School,” “The Killing School” chose me. You see, this book literally just showed up to my house one day. I had purchased my 14-year-old son, an avid Boy Scout and outdoorsman, a subscription to “Crate Club,” a company founded by “The Killing School” author Brandon Webb. Once a month my…
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Oxford University Press has hit a homerun with their snappy “Very Short Introduction” series of books, covering literally hundreds of topics from Accounting to Writing & Script. This volume on the French Revolution by William Doyle, also the author of the authoritative single volume “The Oxford History of the French Revolution,” offers a crisp and…
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