I wasn’t sure that someone could make talking about the fairly straightforward Garden of Eden story interesting for several hundred pages, but I’ve always been interested in the implications the story has for Christianity and spiritual philosophy, so I decided to give this book a try. What a great decision. Yes, it was a bit Read More …
Tag: History
Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
I did not read the volume that preceded this book, “Ghost Wars,” but that was no handicap in quickly getting into the story of Directorate S and its peculiar role in the , essentially, defeat of American goals in Afghanistan. Coll’s incredibly vivid descriptions of characters, events and competing political and ideological interests in Pakistan, Read More …
Book Review: Divine Fury
The best part of Divine Fury is the final 30 pages, wherein McMahon reflects on the impressively diverse and thorough research that is reflected in the rest of his discussion of the nature of “genius” and how our understanding of it has changed over the course of the centuries. In his epilogue, he reflects on Read More …
Review: The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall-and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill by Greg Mitchell
The deepest impression this book had on me was the reminder, perhaps the confrontation with the reality, of the soulless repression of Soviet-style communism in the mid-20th century. Mitchell’s narration and his description are not particularly enthralling, but his matter-of-fact manner of laying out the details of the tunnel missions of the early 1960s makes Read More …
Review: Dead Presidents – An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation’s Leaders
The best way I can think of to describe this book is as a frequently clever, always engaging collection of presidential trivia roughly linked to, as the title promises, the many strange deaths and sometimes surprising legacies of several American presidents. In my reading of presidents’ biographies, I’ve often been intrigued by the torments many Read More …
Review of Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson
The full title of Anderson’s history is Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East and it is a thoroughly accurate description. For, this book is about precisely each of the topics mentioned, and it weaves them together in such a thoughtful way that it is impossible not to contemplate their impact on and relevance Read More …
Review of “Becoming Madison” by Michael Signer
The author doesn’t say so in so many words, and I’m not astute enough to know whether it was his intent or not, but it’s next to impossible not to read Becoming Madison / The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father as a reflection on the conflict between government and the equivalent of the modern-day Tea Read More …
Book review: The Quartet by Joseph J. Ellis
Joseph J. Ellis is one of those reliable chroniclers of American history – in the company of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough – who cover the most familiar historical ground, yet somehow reshape it into something new. The Quartet only reinforces this reputation. Here, Ellis examines the studied combination of efforts from four “nationalists” – George Washington, John Jay, Read More …
Book Review: Medieval Christianity by Kevin Madigan
It’s a little awkward to give this book a star rating, because it’s kind of more like a textbook than a book one normally reads for pleasure or even to learn from in a casual historical context. But all that said, I got a lot out of Medieval Christianity. My greatest interest as it relates Read More …
Book review: If I Should Die Before I Wake: One Marine’s Experiences on Iwo Jima
It’s really not fair to give this book a star rating, because John B. Lyttle’s 85-page memoir is clearly not intended as a deep personal narrative but a short informal memory of one man’s experience in a major world event. It’s not meant for an audience interested in historical detail so much as for family, friends Read More …