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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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John Hale was an undergraduate student of the famed classicist Donald Kagan at Yale in the early 1970s when he first fell in love with ancient Greek history. Hale was also a member of the college crew team and was thus intimately familiar with the mechanics and challenges of strenuous rowing, a unique and valuable…
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Paul Kennedy made quite a splash with “The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery” when it first came out in 1976, although I’m not entirely sure why. His primary theses – that the rise and fall of sea power track closely with that of economic power, and that the effective exercise of military might…
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The great Greek historian Thucydides remarked that Athens in the 430s BC “was in name a democracy, but really a government by the first person.” That first man – “protos amer” in Greek – was Pericles, son of Xanthippus, the hero of the Battle of Mycale against the Persians in 479, mentee of the radical…
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In Poland in September 1939 – and then in even more dramatically in France eight months later – the German army shocked the world with the speed and audacity of their armored invasions that seemed to break all the rules. It was an entirely new style of war called blitzkrieg – “Lightning War.” Conceptualized during…
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The modern American home is a veritable wonderland of technical innovations: clean water on demand, central heating and air conditioning, wireless Internet and telephony, flat screen electronics, and inexpensive lighting, to name just a few. “How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World” by popular science writer Steven Johnson describes, at…
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I wanted to love this book. It directly addresses a topic that has been vexing since I began studying ancient Athenian democracy in earnest this past year: Why were classical Athenians – both individually and collectively – capable of both genius and stupidity? How could the same people who created the Parthenon and theatrical tragedy…
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The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history. Given how bloody other centuries have been, that is really saying something. Why is western civilization, so remarkably progressive in so many ways, so obstinately aggressive and warlike? In “The Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World,” historian Doyne Dawson argues that the…
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Other historians, such as Arthur Schlesinger, have argued that the revolution had its impetus in the preservation of society, not its transformation, which is what usually defines “revolutions.” Wood claims that this assertion is misguided and limited. He concedes that the American Revolution was unique among national revolutions, but that doesn’t make it any less…
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Many years back I endeavored to read a full-length biography on each of the Founding Fathers. For most, I had multiple options and several had undisputed “definitive” single volumes available, such as McCullough on Adams and Chernow on Hamilton. For Benjamin Franklin, Carl Van Doren’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winner was still considered the best, but I…
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