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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 Pioneers: The heroic story of the settlers who brought the American ideal west” traces the epic migration of hearty Americans who settled the Ohio River valley from the end of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Author David McCullough uses the obscure town of Marietta, Ohio as his focal point and uses the…
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There is a theme to Walter Isaacson’s award-winning biographies: from Einstein and Jobs to Franklin and Leonardo, he focuses on men “who make connections across disciplines – arts and sciences, humanities and technology – as a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.” This 2017 biography of Leonardo da Vinci is every bit as good as…
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Ho Chi Minh was one of the most important political figures of the twentieth century. Yet much of his life has been shrouded in mystery. In this scholarly and highly detailed biography first published in 2000, the former Vietnam-based foreign service officer turned professor William Duiker seeks to pull back the veil of secrecy surrounding…
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I’ve read several scholarly accounts of the Russian Revolution, but nowhere have the events of 1917 in Petrograd come alive quite like they do in Helen Rappaport’s masterful “Caught in the Revolution: Witnesses to the Fall of Imperial Russia.” Rappaport breaks her quick flowing narrative down into thirds. Part I, The February Revolution, chronicles the…
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Nobody does it quite like Candice Millard. She finds relatively obscure historical events – the assassination of President Garfield, the Amazon adventure of former President Teddy Roosevelt, and here the young exploits of Winston Churchill in South Africa – and turns them into absolutely top-notch popular history. Her narratives are compulsively readable. My only complaint…
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Originally published in 1964, “The Arms of Krupp” has earned the title of a non-fiction classic. Highly readable, the tale William Manchester tells is fascinating and all the more enjoyable for his mordant wit. At over 800 pages in length, however, it is a daunting read and at times can feel overwhelming. The Krupp steel…
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Nathaniel Philbrick is one of this country’s very best popular narrative historians. In “Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution” he delivers another fast-paced and insightful history of the “Glorious Cause.” Although Philbrick’s story focuses on the dramatic role played by Benedict Arnold (and to a lesser degree George…
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There has long been a great lacuna in American history – the 150 years between the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 and the American Revolution of the 1770s. Nathaniel Philbrick turns his talented pen to this obscure period in the 2006 bestseller “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War.” Philbrick’s narrative essentially covers…
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There are lots of books on the Russian Revolution. Few are as comprehensive and compelling as Orlando Figes’ “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891 – 1924,” first published to wide critical acclaim in 1997. Figes takes a broad view of his subject; his history stretches over nearly two generations, from the famine of 1891…
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