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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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Henry Ford may very well be greatest entrepreneur in American history. Few have had a greater impact on their time and culture the way Ford did in early twentieth century America. There are many biographies available on Ford, but “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century” by Steven Watts may be the very…
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All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2008) by by Stephen Kinzer
In August 1953, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a clumsy coup d’état orchestrated by the infant Central Intelligence Agency. Veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer expertly tells this outrageous story of subterfuge in “All the Shah’s Men.” For Kinzer the episode is a cautionary tale of western meddling in Middle…
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Herbert Hoover is mainly remembered today for his disastrous single term as president at the start of the Great Depression. That is unfortunate, as he is undoubtedly one of the most talented men of his generation and led a life jam-packed with memorable feats and achievements. In “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” Kenneth…
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When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Edward Lansdale was a 38-year-old advertising executive in San Francisco with a wife and two young children with no background or education in national security or defense policy. Amazingly, within twenty years he would emerge as the country’s leading expert on counter-insurgency. Author Max Boot…
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Richard Pipes was a prominent scholar of Russian history at Harvard for nearly half a century. Born in Poland in 1923, he was a virulent anti-communist and served in the Reagan administration National Security Council in the early 1980s. The fact that he dedicates “The Russian Revolution” to “the victims” tells you all you need…
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I deployed to southern Afghanistan in late 2009, roughly the same time that Carter Malkasian arrived as the lead political officer in Garmser in Helmand Province. It was just the beginning of the so-called “Obama Surge” into Afghanistan and the situation in many areas in southern Afghanistan – Helmand Province in particular – was bleak.…
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The story of T.E. Lawrence and the Sykes-Picot agreement has been told many times before. Nowhere perhaps better than David Fromkin’s award-winning “A Peace to End All Peace.” Scott Anderson tackles the topic from an interesting angle. He tells the story in narrative form following four inter-related characters: T.E. Lawrence; the Jewish spy-leader, Aaron Aaronsohn;…
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What a difference a few years make! When “Private Empire” was first published in 2013, ExxonMobil was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, a quarter-trillion-dollar behemoth, delivering jaw-dropping quarterly profit statements that late night talk show hosts found as monologue fodder. By the dawn of 2020, however, the world had changed whereas…
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Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 is legendary – and rightfully so. All I knew about it before reading Adam Zamoyski’s “Moscow, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March” was that the Russian winter defeated Napoleon’s Grand Armee. I had no idea how horrific the whole experience was for soldiers and civilians, alike, nor the historical context in which…
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