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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 first in a monumental five volume series on the 36th president of the United States, “The Path to Power” takes nearly 800 pages to cover just the first 32 years of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s life. Often times biographers lose their sense of objectivity about their subject and end up writing a glowing hagiography. Such…
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Volume II of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” takes place over just seven years, from 1941 to 1948, the interregnum between Johnson’s two US senate races. It marks perhaps the lowest ebb in Johnson’s political fortunes, a period of deep and lasting personal malaise. Volume I, “The Path to Power,” introduces Johnson as a man…
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The third volume in Robert Caro’s monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” “Master of the Senate” focuses in on Johnson’s storied tenure in the Senate from 1949 to 1960. Overall, Caro is less critical of Johnson than in previous volumes. He writes in awe of Johnson’s improbably fast and remarkably high ascent within the cloistered…
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Henry Halleck is probably the most consequential Civil War general that you’ve never heard of. In this slender 1962 biography by famed historian Stephen Ambrose, Halleck emerges from the shadows to take his rightful place in the pantheon of Union war generals. Halleck graduated third in his West Point class of 1839 and was immediately…
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I first read “Upton and the Army” in the mid-1990s when I worked in national security and defense circles. The US military was wrestling with the implications of a new “Revolution in Military Affairs,” a dramatic and discontinuous change in military capabilities wrought by the Information Age. In the post Cold War environment, serious military…
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“Witness,” Whittaker Chambers’s classic autobiography, was first published in 1952 in the midst of the Red Scare known as McCarthyism. It dropped like a fifty-gallon drum of gasoline onto a bonfire. Chambers was a former Communist operative turned state’s witness. He was raised in a fractured family living in near poverty on Long Island. After…
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I suppose many prospective readers of “Washington’s Spies” will also be enthusiastic viewers of the AMC Original Series “Turn,” which is loosely based on the book. The key word, readers will find, is “loosely.” The core cast of characters in “Washington’s Spies” will be familiar to any faithful watcher of “Turn”: The Yale educated intelligence…
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For far too long the African-American experience has not been fully or accurately captured in American history books. At the time of the American Revolution, 20% of the 2.5 million people in the colonies were black. In the plantation provinces, such as Virginia, that proportion could be as high as 40%. Of the roughly 500,000…
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The year 2020 is a rough time to be a slaveholding Founding Father. As the mob indiscriminately tears down statues across America, I would argue there is no better time to read a book like this, an honest, richly textured Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from the celebrated Ron Chernow that brilliantly puts George Washington’s enormous contributions…
What's Tim Reading Now? 