All Posts
Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War, first published in 1979, remains one of the most absorbing accounts of imperial warfare ever written. It is at once sweeping and immediate: a grand chronicle of armies clashing across South Africa’s high veldt, yet also a study of private fears and petty ambitions that together reshaped the British Empire’s…
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I’ve probably read close to a thousand works of non-fiction at this point in my life, and Simon Schama’s “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution” is in my Top Five. That’s really swaying something! Citizens is one of those rare works of history that truly reads like an epic novel, bursting with vivid characters,…
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When William H. McNeill published “Plagues and Peoples” in 1976, it startled historians and anthropologists alike. Here was a sweeping, erudite global history that placed microbes – not kings, generals, or economic systems – at the center of the human story. In doing so, McNeill challenged centuries of historical writing that had largely treated disease…
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When Garrett Mattingly’s “The Armada” was first published in 1959, it became an immediate sensation – not just among historians, but among general readers. It won the National Book Award and quickly carved out a reputation as one of the most engaging works of narrative history ever written. Even today, over half a century later,…
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David M. Potter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history “The Impending Crisis” (1976) is that rare historical work which, decades after its publication, remains not only authoritative but essential. Posthumously published in 1976 and completed by his Stanford colleague Don E. Fehrenbacher, the book distills nearly a lifetime of scholarship into a sweeping, judicious, and penetrating account of…
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I first discovered this book in a box of donated books at a forward operating base on the Afghan-Pakistan border in 2010. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the most entertaining works of history I’ve ever picked up. Alison Weir has an unusual knack for putting flesh-and-bones on long dead…
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Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance” (2000) stands as a remarkable achievement in making the complex world of ancient philosophy accessible to modern readers, much the way Bertrand Russell’s seminal “The History of Western Philosophy” (1946) did for previous generations. Gottlieb’s group biography does for…
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In the pantheon of “great project books,” David McCullough’s “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (1977) may be the best. It is a sweeping and authoritative chronicle of one of the most ambitious engineering projects in human history. With characteristic narrative verve and exhaustive research, McCullough traces the efforts…
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David McCullough has long been one of my favorite popular historians. He can turn almost any event into a compulsively readable, character-driven adventure story. “The Wright Brothers” (2015) was written in McCullough’s twilight years (he died in 2022) and it isn’t nearly as commanding or dense as his earlier award-winning works, like “Truman” (1992) or…
What's Tim Reading Now? 