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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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Freedom of speech has arguably never been more important in America than it is right now in 2022. The issue has been shaping us from the moment European colonists arrived on American shores in the early seventeenth century. The legendary case of outspoken Boston Puritan Anne Hutchinson resonates today for a variety of reasons. “American…
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“Merchant Princes” is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s all-time favorite books. During an appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast, Gladwell noted that he loves this 1977 bestseller so much he often gives away copies to people he meets, especially if they’re Jewish. That is pretty high praise coming from one of my favorite non-fiction authors. I…
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Teddy Roosevelt has long been a personal hero of mine. However, after reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2013 bestseller, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” I now may be an even bigger fan of the jovial but largely misunderstood and now generally forgotten William Taft. As sometimes happens,…
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The sinking of the Cunard luxury liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915 is perhaps the most dramatic waypoint on America’s three-year long political and diplomatic journey before formal military intervention in the First World War. Bestselling author Erik Larson adds much texture and new detail to this familiar story in “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing…
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Socrates (or possibly Eleanor Roosevelt) reportedly once said, “strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.” No matter what kind of mind you possess, Louis Menand’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America” might be the book for you because it discusses lots of ideas,…
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John Barry writes tremendous character-driven historical narratives. He is perhaps best known for his 2004 bestseller “The Great Influenza” about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which returned to the bestseller list in 2020 as COVID-19 swept the globe. “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” came out in 1997…
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Great projects can make for great reading. I loved reading about the building of the Erie Canal (Bernstein), the transcontinental railroad (Bain), the Brooklyn Bridge (McCullough), and the Panama Canal (McCullough again). With “Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century,” Michael Hiltzik takes his place in this esteemed circle of bestselling historians.…
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John Steinbeck is arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In “John Steinbeck: A Biography,” the great author’s life and times are dramatically chronicled by the magnificent (although sometimes pretentious) Jay Parini, a writer and professor of literature at Middlebury College in Vermont. I picked up “John Steinbeck” immediately after reading Parini’s deft…
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Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is one of the more celebrated American historians of the twentieth century, having won two Pulitzer Prizes while teaching at Harvard for many decades. He also had meaningful and relevant stints in government, first as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then as a…
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