All Posts
Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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Nobody writes about early English history better than Alison Weir. Her book “The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth” (1991) is one of my all-time favorites. I picked up “Eleanor of Aquitaine” (1999) for the simple reason it was written by Alison Weir. I knew next to nothing about Eleanor before reading this book, not…
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Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack Rakove is one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read. Normally, I can plow through works like this in a week or two. But with Original Meanings, I often found myself struggling to get through more than six to ten pages…
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Laura Hillenbrand sure knows how to pick a story to tell. I think she’s only published two books in the past twenty years – “Seabiscuit” (1999) and “Unbroken” (2010) – but both have been mindboggling hits, selling over 13 million copies worldwide. However, reading “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,”…
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The United States Constitution places numerous restrictions on the powers of the federal government. Yet, in its 235-year history, only two constitutional amendments have explicitly prohibited individuals from engaging in specific activities: owning slaves (13th Amendment) and purchasing alcohol (18th Amendment). In Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, author Daniel Okrent tells the…
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The Economist magazine recently held up “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy” (2016) by Joel Mokyr as one of the three most outstanding books of all time in explaining the emergence of global capitalism. That’s pretty high praise. Mokyr’s writing is dense and scholarly, yet it remains remarkably lucid and accessible.…
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Normally I don’t pay much attention to the endorsements on the back cover of a book. “The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern Word, 1788-1800” (2007) by Jay Winik was an exception. Some of the most distinguished historians and biographers in the country lined up to heap lavish praise on this book:…
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You’d think there would be a lot of great books available about the democracy of ancient Athens, but you’d be wrong. Over the past few years, I have taken several excellent online courses on the subject, including one by Yale University’s Donald Kagan, the American doyen of classical studies. However, I’ve found that I struggle…
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The Iranian Revolution is a fascinating subject. I’ve wanted to learn more about the events of 1978-79 for a long time, but I couldn’t find any book that was generally recognized as the objective and definitive account. I decided to pick up “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran”…
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I first discovered Robert Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” (1953) when I was an undergraduate majoring in economics in the mid-1990s. I was captivated by its unique blend of history, biography, and economic theory. I wasn’t alone in my fascination. “The Worldly Philosophers” is the second most successful economic book in history behind only Paul Samuelson’s…
