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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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Stacy Schiff is one of my favorite living historians. Another is Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Alexander Hamilton.” Here is what Chernow has to say about Schiff: “Even if forced at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence.” It’s true; Schiff has the unique ability…
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Erich von Manstein was considered by his peers as the most talented general officer in the German army. His celebrated Second World War memoir, “Lost Victories,” chronicles his exploits, frustrations, victories and defeats as a chief of staff in Poland in 1939, commander of 38th Corps in France in 1940, 56th Panzer Corps during the…
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The Cleopatra most of us know is a fictional creation. The story we know comes mainly from the early first century Roman writers Plutarch and Dio. According to author Stacy Schiff, that’s like reading a history of twentieth-century America written by Chairman Mao. In short, our image of Cleopatra is “the joint creation of Roman…
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“He was the first martyr of free speech and free thought.” So claims I.F. Stone in this 1988 bestseller about the trial and execution of Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, in 399 BC. Thirty years after its initial publication, the relevance of the story has never been greater. In a world of campus safe spaces,…
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Barry Strauss is a world-class academic classicist, but “The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece — and Western Civilization” is geared for the more general reader. He tells the story of the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BC and the decisive naval battle at Salamis with an easy style focused on…
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The final installment in Alistair Horne’s epic trilogy on the Franco-German military rivalry, “To Lose a Battle: France 1940” is by far the longest and most tactically detailed of the three. The book is broken into two parts. The first, covering about a third of the book, chronicles the political turmoil and military missteps in…
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They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. The same could even be said for its title. Paul Rahe’s latest effort, “The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge,” is an excellent book, it just doesn’t have all that much to do with the grand strategy of classical Sparta. Rather, it is…
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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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