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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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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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This certainly isn’t the book for everyone. Written a century ago, “The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution” is one of the more influential works on the subject from an American historian in the early twentieth century (Schlesinger’s son would turn out to be even more influential on the course of American politics and historical…
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There are plenty of general histories of the French Revolution for the general reader to choose from. If I had just one to recommend it would be either Simon Schama’s magisterial “Citizens” or William Doyle’s classic “Oxford History of the French Revolution.” If asked what book would make a good companion to one of these…
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