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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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Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” may be the most popular non-fiction title of the past decade. It has sold more than 10 million copies and appears in dozens of languages. What surprised me most after finally getting around to reading it is how relatively unoriginal it all is. Harari divides his…
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The events leading up to the American Revolution have been endlessly debated. In “An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight for America,” journalist-turned-historian Nick Bunker lays out a crisp narrative that argues, it seems to me, that the conflict between mother country and colonies was more or less unavoidable by 1775. The…
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American involvement in the Middle East has dominated US foreign policy since at least the Iranian Revolution of 1979. But, as American-Israeli scholar Michael Oren writes in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to Present,” US involvement in the Middle East is long and complex, dating from literally the founding of…
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Anthropologists have long noted that marriage is virtually universally present in all cultures across time and place. From that observation it has been extrapolated that monogamous pair bonding is the natural mating arrangement for Homo sapiens. In “Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships,” Christopher Ryan…
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I picked up this book at a local library book sale. Last year I read “An Empire on the Edge” by the same author and thought I would give “Making Haste from Babylon” a try. There is much one might comment upon in Nick Bunker’s narrative of the Pilgrim experience, but I’ll limit mine to…
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How did a small, fringe sect of perhaps twenty illiterate, Aramaic-speaking Jews in early first-century Palestine come to dominate the entire Roman Empire just four centuries later? That’s the central question posed by renowned religious scholar Bart Ehrman in “The Triumph of Christianity” — a deeply engaging and thought-provoking book. The astonishing rise of Christianity,…
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William Faulkner is indisputably one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded virtually every honor a writer can receive during a lifetime (Nobel, Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc.) and his place in the American literary canon has held firm as we approach the centennial of his entry into the world…
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My all-time favorite play is “A Man For All Seasons,” Robert Bolt’s 1960 awarding-winning performance about the life and times of Sir Thomas More. I picked up this 1998 biography of More by the novelist Peter Ackroyd hoping to learn more about the main character, his beliefs, and his motivations. I was particularly intrigued because…
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Sir Thomas More, canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935, was famously known as “A Man For All Seasons,” a brilliant, noble, pious, well-educated, devoted man and incorruptible defender of the crown and faith; he laid down his life in 1535 rather than sacrifice his religious beliefs. More’s life and death has inspired millions down…
What's Tim Reading Now? 