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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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Biographies of basic commodities come in all shapes and sizes. Some are monumental achievements and major award winners, such as Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil (1990) and Sven Beckett’s Bancroft Award winning story of cotton (2014). Others are less inspiring, but fun nevertheless, such Mark Kurlansky’s books about salt (2002) and the…
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Samuel Insull is almost completely forgotten today, even in Chicago where he was once one of the most prominent and wealthiest men in the city. Few have risen so high starting from a position so low. Even fewer have crashed more swiftly, completely and spectacularly. In “The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison, and…
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I’m usually quite reluctant to read non-fiction books written in the nineteenth century or earlier. I’ve found that even enduring classics like “The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783” (1890) by Alfred Thayer Mahan and “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776) by Edward Gibbon to be painful slogs. Francis Parkman’s “Montcalm…
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In the summer of 1994 I departed for a semester study abroad program at Moscow State University. It was barely three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and it would prove to be a wild, often unforgettable experience. A few months before I left, David Remnick’s “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the…
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The North Atlantic maritime powers of the sixteenth century were determined to break the stranglehold that Spain and Portugal had on the trade routes to Asia in the southern hemisphere. They were convinced that there was a northwest passage along the northeastern seaboard of North America. It was just a matter of finding it. Roughly…
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Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was a German-Swiss painter who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. One of his most famous paintings – “The Ambassadors”(1533) – hangs today in the National Gallery in London. It is rich in symbolism of life in the late Renaissance. The two ambassadors stand in front of a table filled…
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“In general, endings always remain unclear.” So says Theodore K. Rabb, professor of Renaissance and early modern Europe at Princeton University, in “The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity” (2006), a crisp but powerful essay on the generally neglected historical topic: “What came after the Renaissance?” Several suggestions have been made.…
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Samuel Champlain was born in the Atlantic coastal village of Brouage in 1574 during a time of religious upheaval in France (nine religious wars between 1562 and 1598). Fischer speculates that Champlain was baptized and born Protestant and then converted to Catholicism, to which he remained deeply devoted for the rest of his life. “[Champlain]…
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Ross King has a PhD in eighteenth century English Literature from York University in Canada, yet he has made a name for himself as a popular historian and biographer of the Italian Renaissance. Over the past two decades, he has written lively biographical narratives of artist Michelangelo (2003), bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (2021), and architect…
What's Tim Reading Now? 