History and Biography

I probably read more books in this category than any other (including HCI and CSCW, I’ll admit). I mostly read about the 20th century, but some other periods intrude every so often. Dan Russell has accused me in public of reading a lot about World War II, and I confess that I do. But it’s not the only period, and recently, I’ve had a special interest in the Seventeenth Century.

Madeleine Albright. Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Madeleine Albright was the US Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, serving from 1997 to 2001. As she states in her introduction to this intriguing book, she was 59 when she began serving as Secretary of State, and at that time assumed she knew who she was and what her background was. She was in for a major surprise. She was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and her family fled to England to escape Hitler’s grasp. She was raised as a Roman Catholic, and when she married, became a convert to the Episcopalian faith. In early 1997, around the time she was being vetted to be Secretary of State, an article appeared in the Washington Post revealing that three of her grandparents and others in her family had died in the Holocaust. Members of her family, and later herself, traveled to the Czech Republic to investigate these claims, and verified that indeed her family had been Jewish. This fact underlies this remarkable memoir, where armed with the new information about her true roots, she covers the period of her early years and the struggles of both her family and her homeland. It’s one of the most gripping memoirs I have ever read.

Scott Anderson. Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Like many in my generation, I’ve been fascinated by the figure of T.E. Lawrence ever since seeing David Lean’s 1962 film. I had read earlier biographies of Lawrence, which, like the film, tended to persist in developing his celebrity. Anderson’s book is a sober, much more balanced story of that period. It opened my eyes about what was really going on, who the other significant players were (several of whom I’d never heard of in the earlier accounts), and what a complex and, in the end, sad period this was. I like the trope of the simple change of preposition from “of” to “in” in the title of the book. Read this for a much better version of Lawrence and the context of his escapades.

Anne Applebaum. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

The Gulag is the vast system of prisons and camps distributed throughout the Soviet Union, from shortly after the revolutions of 1917 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It began as a way of incarcerating opponents of the regime under Lenin, but evolved into a slave labor system that was an attempt to assist in the economic development of a very poor nation. Applebaum covers its long history in detail, and through extensive research uncovers the many awful characteristics of the system. Many of the facilities were in remote, harsh environments, especially in the barren northern regions that had things the USSR wanted: oil, coal, gold, and many other things important to economic development. The camps were a mix of real criminals and “politicals”, the latter often were largely innocent people trapped by the arbitrary policies of the secret police. Applebaum is able to draw on a rich collection of memoirs, perhaps the most famous are those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. All in all, this is a moving and horrifying history of the Soviet regimes’ instruments of terror. 

Anne Applebaum. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. New York: Doubleday, 2012.

As World War ii ended, the USSR took control of roughly a dozen countries in eastern Europe that its army had occupied as it drove the Nazis back to Germany. The four allies, USSR, US, England, and France divided up Germany and the city of Berlin into four segments. Each of the countries occupied by the Soviets became communist dictatorships, complete with secret police which hassled their respective citizens in the same way the Soviets did. This is a detailed history of all that, tracing how the Soviets took control behind what Churchill called an Iron Curtain. This situation lasted up until 1989, and by 1991 the USSR itself collapsed. One interesting revelation in this book is that the Soviets as early as 1939 began preparations for this set of conquests. The war began with a secret agreement between the Soviets and the Nazis, dividing up Poland and ceding the Baltic states to the USSR. The Soviets set up a training school, and began training candidates for communist leadership  in these various states. They also began training of secret police forces for these lands. When Germany invaded the USSR, this training was put on hold. But following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, when the fortunes of Germany  began to unwind, the Russians resumed this training, enlarging its scope to include the other lands that they  expected to occupy as they drove the Nazis back into Germany from the east. Of course, the political and economic situations in these controlled lands after the war remained poor. With the help of the  Marshall Plan, western European countries restored economic prosperity and political stability. The economies of the Soviet controlled countries did not prosper, and their citizens resisted communist control. Rebellions i n East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia required Soviet military intervention. Applebaum’s rich history covers in detail all these developments, revealing details that I had not been aware of even though I lived through most of this period. 

Anne Applebaum. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. New York: Doubleday, 2017.

Roughly 4.5 million Ukrainians died of starvation in a state-initiated famine of 1932/33. It was triggered by Stalin’s move to collectivize agriculture in the hope of increasing yields of crops. The Ukrainian peasants resisted this move, with the result that crop yields were reduced dramatically. Further, the owners of farms, called “kulaks,” were persecuted and mostly ended up in the Gulag. Yet the Soviet regime requested impossible amounts of grain to be shipped out of Ukraine, to support workers who lived in other regions and to support foreign sales in order to accrue hard currencies needed to facilitate economic development by purchasing machinery and equipment that was only available abroad. When the demands for grain were not met, the regime created teams that would go to peasants homes and confiscate any food they could find, and persecute any who tried to hide food for feeding their own families. They also set up barriers so peasants could not travel to find food or even work in other areas. The result was a disastrous famine. The Soviets also did everything they could to combat Ukrainian nationalism by forbidding the use of the Ukrainian language, persecuting Ukrainian intellectuals, and closing cultural organizations. The regime also did everything to cover up that the famine ever happened, such as arresting Ukrainian historians and trying to destroy their work, cancelling the 1937 census so that the drop in population would not be revealed, and instructing medical officials to falsify the cause of death on death certificates. But those who survived the famine knew what happened, and when the Soviet Union ended in 1991 the story could be told to the world. Furthermore, the former Soviet archives revealed all the things that the regime knew at the time and the actions they took. It’s ironic that so many of the characteristics of the Russian/Ukrainian past are reborn in the nasty war that Vladimir Putin launched recently.

A.J. Baime. The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

On April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman became President when Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Truman had been a surprise choice to be Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1944 election, for Roosevelt’s fourth term as President. Truman hadn’t wanted to be the Vice President, especially since it was widely known that Roosevelt’s health was failing and that this particular Vice President was likely to become President. Indeed, Truman became President less than three months into Roosevelt’s fourth term. This book focuses on the first four months of Truman’s Presidency, that included an astonishing array of world-shaking events. The war in Europe ended, accompanied by the discovery of the Nazi death camps. Truman was informed of the Manhattan Project, which he hadn’t known anything about, and he had to face the question of whether or not to use the atomic bomb. Relationships with Russia, who had been our ally during the war, went badly south, culminating with the terrible Potsdam conference of the English, Americans, and Soviets. Truman and his many advisers reached the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, assuming it would work. Just before the Potsdam conference began, the Trinity test of the bomb in New Mexico worked. Truman told Stalin about the bomb, and the latter’s surprising lack of reaction to the news resulted from the fact that he already knew about it via Soviet spies, and the Soviets were already working on their own bomb. The Japanese surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II, but meant the beginning of the Cold War that would occupy the US for nearly five decades. Toward the end of this initial four months, Truman’s approval rating was in the high 80s. The rest of his Presidency would not go as well, and by the end of his full term in 1952 he was quite unpopular. But as Baime points out, over time his reputation has gained considerably, and he is often listed in the top ten all time of Presidents. This well-written biographical piece is definitely worth the read.

Julia Baird. Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire. New York: Random House, 2016.

Up until 2015, when Elizabeth II passed her, Victoria had been the longest serving ruler of Great Britain, and had an entire era named after her. Baird’s biography had unique access to a range of materials that no prior biographer had seen. The record of Victoria’s reign is spotty, since custodians of her correspondence had deleted much from the record, her youngest daughter had destroyed her diary (but some enterprising archivist had photographed it and kept it hidden until Baird was able to see it), and the diary and notes of Victoria’s physician were kept under wraps until Baird got permission to examine them. As a result, there is considerable fresh material in this new biography. Baird is a superb story teller, and Victoria’s life and times make for a most engaging story. She had an unsettled childhood. She became Queen at age 18, and served until she died at age 82. She worked with ten different prime ministers, and her relations with them were quite varied. Her marriage to Albert was legendary (see the detailed story reviewed below), but he died young and the Queen in some ways never fully recovered. She wore black until she died. She did not like wearing the crown and heavy robes of her office. Instead she wore a black bonnet most of the time. The claimed that men were more competent than women, and deferred a lot to Alfred. But she could be feisty and meddlesome in government affairs, and was a role model for the growing women’s suffrage movement. She had a somewhat mysterious, close relationship with a Scottish horse handler, John Brown, and had a number of special items from him put in her casket when she died. In her later years she had an Indian assistant who most family members and officials despised. She was both loved and criticized by her subjects. She was, in short, a very complex and interesting person, and Baird does both her complexity and her uniqueness justice.

Sarah Bakewell. How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. New York: Other Press, 2010.

This is perhaps the most unusual biography I’ve ever read. It takes as its organizing principle the attempt to answer the question, “how to live.” Then in 20 chapters it takes one of Montaigne’s attempts at an answer, amplifies it, and uses the opportunity to weave in details about Montaigne’s life. By the end, we’ve covered his life and sampled many of his essays. It’s a tour de force, extremely well crafted. It also reinforces the point that Montaigne’s way of writing created an entirely new genre, the personal essay. No topic was too mundane, or for that matter, uninteresting, to tackle in prose. It definitely led me to sample his essays (which, by the way, are voluminous!).

John M. Barry. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. New York: Penguin, 2004 original publication 2018 updated edition.

There could not be a more timely book to read in 2020 during our COVID-19 pandemic. This is the story, in all its amazing detail, of the great influenza epidemic that began in 1918, and continued for a couple of years after that. It was a frightful tragedy. The estimates are that it killed 675,000 Americans, and somewhere between 50 and 100 million worldwide. But it also had long-term physical and psychological consequences as well. The story as told by Barry has many angles. He begins with an account of the state of medicine in the early 20th century. That was the period where a handful of pioneers moved to bring science into medical practice. Sadly, much prior practice was based on false beliefs and guesses about how to treat various maladies. Bleeding was still a common treatment for a wide range of cases. But major advances like the emergence of germ theory toward the end of the 19th century moved these pioneers to do research aimed at uncovering what it was that caused disease, and what could be done to cure and even prevent it. As a result, there was a lot of research done during this pandemic, though the final solution as to what caused the devastating pandemic did not emerge until after it was over. The players in this drama receive center stage treatment from Barry, and it’s a gripping story of hard work, left turns, false conclusions, and desperate attempts at cures. One thing Barry does is tell in detail the story of what actually happened to those who suffered from the influenza, based on our modern understanding of the epidemiology and physiology of the viral attack and subsequent complications (usually pneumonia). He also describes in great detail the unfolding of the epidemic, which may have started in rural Kansas, but quickly engulfed the many military bases that were trying to prepare soldiers and sailors for the European war. The outbreaks on these hastily built and overcrowded bases were devastating. And travel among the bases plus of course travel to Europe ensured the eventual worldwide spread of the virus. And the bungling and lying of political leaders insured widespread fear and confusion. There were widespread shortages of people — doctors and nurses — , supplies, and even in many cases food and water. Barry’s portraits of what happened in Philadelphia are especially graphic. At the peak of the epidemic there were thousands of deaths every day in that city, overwhelming the medical system and leaving bodies piled up everywhere. The 2018 updated edition has an Afterward that discusses in detail what has happened since 1918 and what the prospects are going forward, and ironically, just two years later we are in the midst of another major pandemic, with the same problems of political ineptness, misunderstanding, and confusion. It is certainly an area where learning from the past seems to escape those who could act to minimize the severity. But as he points out, ultimately it will take the development of effective vaccines to harness the beasts that bring such calamities on us all. This book should be required reading for all political leaders.

Neal Bascomb. The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island, described below, tells the story of how the countries occupied by Germany during World War II organized networks of citizens from the safety of England to carry out espionage and sabotage in their native countries. This volume describes just such efforts by Norwegians. Many Norwegians who fled Norway after it fell to the Germans came to England to be trained for a wide range of missions back in Norway. While a number of different missions are described in this book, its main focus is on efforts to sabotage the production of heavy water at Vemork. Heavy water, or deuterium, was at that time a key ingredient in attempts to create a sustainable nuclear chain reaction. And Norway was the major producer of it in Europe. One early mission employing mostly British sappers aided by Norwegian intelligence ended in disaster when two gliders and one towing aircraft carrying the hit team crashed, and survivors who were captured by the Germans were shortly thereafter assassinated. Another mission, carried out by trained Norwegians, was able to destroy the heart of the heavy water operations at Vemork, with no losses of life, only to have the plant restored to operation in a few months. A subsequent raid by American bombers destroyed much of the plant and killed or wounded many Norwegian civilians, but did not damage the heart of the operation. However, the Germans realized that Vemork was likely to continue to be a major target for the Allies, and decided to dismantle the key equipment and move it to Germany. Yet another operation targeted the removal of the last supply of heavy water by sinking a ferry carrying it, again with the loss of civilian lives. Through meticulous historical work by Bascomb, we get to know a lot about the principals involved in all of these activities. It’s a moving story of commitment and patriotism, clouded as always by great danger. The Germans were ruthless in torture and executions following each mission, including many who were innocent. But an amazing number of the participants escaped and engaged in other missions, ultimately surviving the war. In the background is the story of the relatively feeble commitment in Germany to an atomic weapon program, preferring to invest in other weapons such as rockets. But these details were not clearly known until very late, so that trying to keep the critical heavy water out of German hands was a high priority for the Allies. This excellent history makes a Norwegian soul proud.

Antony Beevor. Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. New York: Viking, 2915.

The Battle of the Bulge was the last major offensive by the Germans in World War II. The “bulge” refers to the major indentation the Germans created in the Allies’ lines. The Allies were close to crossing over into Germany from the West, and the German bulge in their lines moved toward France and the Low Countries. The offensive failed, but not until some of the fiercest and most costly battles of the War on the Western Front. I have always taken a personal interest in this for two reasons: I was born in the middle of the battle (on Dec. 24), and I had an uncle who served in the 101st Airborne, landing on D-Day and subsequently playing a major role in the Battle of the Bulge. He often spoke of the fighting in and around Bastogne, one of the critical sites of this battle. Beevor’s incredibly meticulous account covers the action in great detail. It is tough reading keeping track of all the military units and leaders on both sides that he describes. Both sides were vicious, killing prisoners and civilians. The Nazi massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy was especially horrible. The Germans were not only victims of Allied efforts but also of Hitler’s ill-informed micromanagement and critical shortages of fuel and ammunition. The terrible winter weather also affected both sides. Not long after the Bulge was extinguished the Allies pressed into Germany for the last push toward the Russians who were coming from the East.

Hy Berman, with Jay Weiner. Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Public Historian. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Hy Berman was a history professor at the University of Minnesota. He was born and raised in New York City, but he and his wife (who was an Auschwitz survivor) ventured forth to Minnesota in the early 1960s. His specialty was labor history, but over time his passion became teaching and reaching out to the public. He was an early communist sympathizer, but when he discovered the terrors of Stalin, quickly changed his mind. He was active in Jewish affairs, at a time when Minneapolis and the University had strong anti-Semitic strands. He made nearly 100 appearances on a local public TV station. He was friends with Hubert Humphrey and many other Minnesota political figures, including serving as an informal adviser to Governor Rudy Perpich. He brought informed American history to China, India, and a number of European countries. Late in his life, Jay Weiner, an author of other books to be found on this bookshelf, agreed to take on the task of putting together a personal memoir of Professor Berman. This volume was completed after Berman’s death at the age of 90. It is a great portrait of an amazing public intellectual, whose great wisdom and folksy repartee endeared many to the rumpled professor. Interestingly, I was a student in the early 60s at Minnesota, and minored in history, but sadly, did not encounter this amazing persona. But Jay Weiner does great justice to the man and his legend in this marvelous volume.

Philipp Blom. Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2019.

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the world faced a more than century-long Little Ice Age. The global temperature was about 2 degrees Celsius below normal through much of this period. Though it was worldwide, Blom focuses on Europe. The most devastating effects were on agriculture. Crops either failed, or had markedly reduced yields. Hunger and starvation were widespread. There was snow and ice where there usually was none. Rivers and lakes froze. People struggled with the cold. And Blom’s argument is that much that we associate with the 17th century, politically, intellectually, and culturally, was aided by the stresses and strains of the Little Ice Age. Because of agricultural crises, people left the land for cities, and markets emerged to aid in the shift of crops and other goods across great distances. Intellectual ferment produced great writing and art. Religious turmoil flourished. What we now recognized as scientific styles of thinking emerged. In short, though there were other forces influencing these widespread changes, the cold weather that enveloped Europe played a role as well. In an Epilogue, Blom speculates about the role that climate stresses can play in history, and of course addresses what is going on in our own age.

Lesley M.M. Blume. Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

One of the most remarkable publishing events of the twentieth century was the appearance of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” in an August 1946 issue of The New Yorker. Indeed, this 30,000 word story was the only article in that issue, which was also devoid of its usual collection cartoons and other lighter pieces. It told the story of six survivors of Hiroshima, what their experiences were like and what had happened in the subsequent year. While the world had been shocked by the devastation of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US government tried to hide the subsequent sufferings of those who experienced the deadly effects of the lingering radiation. It’s estimated that approximately 100,000 were killed by the explosion itself, but it’s also been estimated that probably another 150,000 died from radiation sickness. After the surrender of Japan, most of the world’s attention shifted from the awfulness of the dawn of the age of nuclear war to other matters. But Hersey’s gripping account changed that immediately. This book tells the story of how he came to write it. The US occupation forces in Japan, led by Douglas McArthur, limited access to the bombed sites, so once William Shawn had convinced Hersey to do a story about it for The New Yorker, it was a tricky business to get to Hiroshima. While recovering from a bout of flu that he came down with while in China, he got the idea of writing profiles of a small number of survivors from reading Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which uses a similar device to tell the story of those dying when this bridge in the Andes collapsed. It was while he was in China that he got permission to come to Japan, and after arriving there, got permission to go to Hiroshima for a visit of no longer than 14 days. He made initial contact with a Catholic priest from Germany that he had heard about, and with that priest’s assistance identified another five people to interview. It’s an amazing story of his interactions with these six survivors. After getting back to New York, he and the two senior editors of the magazine, holed up to write the story. The original intent was for it to appear serially, but as the project developed, the decision was made to put it all in a single, dedicated issue. It’s impact was to have widespread effects, as it depicted the true horrors of this new kind of weapon. 

Max Boot. The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018.

This is an extraordinarily poignant, and at the same time, very frustrating read. There was present, in the person of Edward Lansdale, a perspective on counterinsurgency that might have made a huge difference in the course of the war in Vietnam. His view, in short, was that “without creating functioning state institutions, there was no way to defeat a determined insurgency [p. 150].” Boot summarizes this point of view with what he calls the three L’s: Learn, Like, Listen. Learn about the people and the culture, like the key leaders, become their friends and advisers, and listen to what they say. In the early 1950s he did this in the Philippines, learning as much as he could about the people and the culture by spending a lot of time traveling around the country and talking to all kinds of people, and then working with Ramon Magsaysay, who with Lansdale’s advice and active support, became an effective leader of a functional, democratic government that overcame the Huk insurgency. Buoyed by this success, he was sent to Vietnam, where he worked with Ngo Dihn Diem to try to do the same there. He did achieve some early success before he left for the US in 1956. The Strategic Hamlet Program that Diem launched was having some success in gaining support for the South Vietnamese government. But all this was lost when Diem was assassinated under US orders. Alas, one of Lansdale’s greatest weaknesses was his disdain for bureaucracy and for many people in leadership positions. He so annoyed a broad range of American leaders that he was increasingly isolated and ignored. In Vietnam policy was taken over by political and military leadership that did not understand his principles. Indeed, one he annoyed the most was Robert McNamara, whose quantitative focus led to the ultimately disastrous policy of measuring progress by  body counts. As Boot describes in great, insightful detail, there was no guarantee that if leadership had adopted Lansdale’s principles that it would have led to success in Vietnam. Indeed, later, in Iraq and Afghanistan, General David Petraeus wrote a field manual that espoused principles very much like Lansdale’s (without ever crediting him) that were tried but never led to success. As Henry Kissinger said to Lansdale on one of his early visits to Vietnam, the situation in Vietnam was very different and much more complicated than the Philippines. But the fact that Lansdale’s ideas were set aside because so many key people vilified the man led to what Boot called “the road not taken.” Lansdale was a complex man, and many things he did for the OSS and CIA (such as lead efforts to get rid of Castro in Cuba) were highly controversial. His reputation later suffered an enormous hit when many of these highly secret things were made public. Boot’s narrative is magnificent. He is sympathetic to Lansdale, without ignoring all of his warts. But he is not at all sympathetic with US leadership that not just ignored Lansdale’s ideas, but pursued policies that were disastrous, resulting in losing the Vietnam War at incredible costs in military and civilian casualties.

Mark Bowden. Huế 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017

I was very much aware of events in 1968, a year like no other. The Tet Offensive was startling to all of us. After months, nay, years, of optimistic reports that the end was in sight, victory was near, there was light at the end of the tunnel, suddenly the whole of South Vietnam was under surprise attack. The US Embassy in Saigon was shelled, cities all over the south were inundated. The worst was Hue, a lovely, historic city on the west coast of South Vietnam, not far from the DMV, the border with the North. Despite denials from General Westmoreland (“Westy”), the National Liberation Front (“the Front”) (consisting of the Viet Cong (VC) and the North Vietnam Army (NVA)) took total control of Hue, and it took nearly a month of bloody and frustrating fighting for the US (MACV) and South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces to reclaim it. Though Westy and the US leadership claimed victory, it was a major turning point. At the end of February, in a famous TV recounting of the Tet events, Walter Cronkite, the dean of American news hosts, memorably said that it was now clear the war was a stalemate, and we needed to look for an honorable end of it. Victory was not possible. It stunned the nation; I remember that broadcast to this day. The antiwar movement now extended to  middle America, who were losing faith in US leadership. A month after the end of Tet, Lyndon Johnson said he was not running for reelection. Bowden’s book covers all of this in great, often grisly detail. American forces, mostly US Marines, had to fight an urban battle in Hue that they were not trained for. US leadership, denying the reality of the Front’s numbers and control of Hue, repeatedly sent small forces into disastrous encounters with the Front’s substantial forces. Both sides took major losses, but the biggest losers were the civilians in Hue. At least 80% of the city was turned to rubble, mostly by MACV and ARVN artillery and bombing. Though exact numbers will never be known, at least 8000 civilians were killed, either accidentally or intentionally. In 1968 I was facing induction, as deferments for graduate study were about to end. So this was all emotionally very real to me. Bowdon vividly brings it all back, with gripping details about soldiers on both sides of the conflict. It’s one of many accounts, sadly, of the enormous stupidity of war. Yet the courage and bravery of those involved is incredible.

Zachary D. Carter. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. New York: Random House, 2020.

John Maynard Keynes was a major figure in 20th century economics, this despite the fact that his academic training was not in that field but in mathematics. He was a key member of the influential Bloomsbury group in London, and was a fixture at Cambridge University. It’s interesting that because of his reputation for brilliance, he was brought in as a consultant regarding the British economy in 1914, lont before he had published anything on economics. But he had an idea that saved the British pound, and led to his long-term role in advising governments on economic matters. His economic thinking was linked to his views about democracy, freedom, and the good life, and he was a prominent anti-authoritarian voice. This engaging history covers Keynes’ thinking and influential activities. His ideas had a major influence on economic thinking in the United States, from Roosevelt right up to the present.

Andrei Cherny. The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour. New York: Berkley Caliber, 2008.

This book was suggested to me by my sister, Linda. At first the title was a bit off putting, but upon embarking on a read, I was gripped by the unfolding story of the Berlin Airlift.  I of course knew in general about the airlift and the bravery of the pilots and the resilience of the Berliners. But many of the details were new, including the whole story of the candy bombing itself. Initially one pilot, Hal Halvorsen, began dropping candy from his plane as he approached Tempelhof airport, suspended from handkerchiefs as parachutes. It grew into a major sensation, and convinced many of the Berliners of the Americans’ good intentions. The Airlift also played a key role in Harry Truman’s upset win over Dewey in the 1948 election. And there are many other dramatic threads to the story.

Winston S. Churchill. The Second World War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Vol. 1: The Gathering Storm. 1948.

Vol. 2: Their Finest Hour. 1949.

Vol. 3: The Grand Alliance. 1950.

Vol. 4: The Hinge of Fate. 1950.

Vol. 5: Closing the Ring. 1951

Vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy. 1953.

I have owned these books (not this set, but an earlier one) since I was in high school, but have never sat down and read them. But having recently re-read David Reynolds’ magnificent account of how these were written (see review below), I decided it was time to dig in. So I ordered this recent reprinted set (my original set is in storage), and read them. It’s complicated reading, as it contains extensive original documents interspersed among the narrative. And it’s not really a scholarly history, but rather Churchill’s recollections on the unfolding events. I pretty much know the history of World War II, having read numerous “real” histories of those times. But it’s most interesting to see these events from Churchill’s perspective. As Reynolds points out, he writes to make himself look different than he was, and also not to offend those who were still alive whom he might have to interact with as he was still active in British politics as he wrote. Indeed, toward the end of the writing he was once more restored to high office, becoming Prime Minister again in 1951. One thing I was really impressed with was how much was going on at the same time that he needed to pay attention to. I cannot imagine the stress of this, especially since we’re talking about people’s lives. Also of interest are his accounts of interactions with other leaders, such as Roosevelt and Stalin. He had earlier written a similar history of World War !, so in this he picks up the story with the Versailles Treaty and its impact on subsequent events. And the story ends with him being turned out of the Prime Ministership in the first election after the end of the war.

Stanley Cloud & Lynne Olson. The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

In the late 1930s, as war loomed in Europe, CBS turned to Edward R. Murrow to cover these events on radio. Broadcast news was in its infancy, and the style of live or near-live coverage that the team assembled by Murrow provided changed the nature of broadcast news forever. Murrow himself was based most of the time in London, and of course provided gripping accounts of the Blitz and other action there. A set of correspondents — ten men and one woman — were scattered among the other venues, and provided reports of action there. For instance, William L. Shirer, based in Berlin, gave accounts of the developments in Nazi Germany. After the war he published a series of volumes about the war, and after having been incredibly close to Murrow, had a falling out that lasted the rest of their lives. Many other names continued to be familiar in radio and television news well into my childhood, including Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, Eric Sevareid, and Howard K. Smith. Radio listeners during the war were spellbound by their reports, and they set new standards for what international reporting could be. Many of these people continued to have dominant roles in TV and radio well into the 60s and 70s. Sadly, after the war, CBS and the other major networks evolved away from the kind of careful reporting reflected by the Murrow Boys, and led to the kind of commercialism and sensationalism that characterizes much of today’s TV news in particular. But Cloud and Olson tell the fascinating story of all these figures and their strengths and foibles.

Ken Cuthbertson. A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.

William L. Shirer was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s and 30s, and became a member of the Murrow Boys (see Cloud & Olson, above) during the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the war. He reported for CBS radio from Berlin until it became too dangerous to remain there. The fact that he returned to the US rather than joining Murrow in London strained their relationship that was in turn permanently sundered in 1947 when Murrow fired Shirer from his Sunday evening news show on CBS. After the war he published a series of books about his experiences in the war, culminating in his huge best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), which I read in high school when it came out and hooked me on history in general and World War II in particular for the rest of my life. Besides the tragic rift with Murrow, he was also suspected of being a Communist sympathizer, which complicated his postwar employment prospects. But the income from his books helped him cope. This excellent biography is a rich and fascinating story of one of the major journalists of the 20th century. The cover photo is Shirer at Compiègne in June of 1940 reporting on the French surrender to the Germans.

Robert Dallek. Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life. New York: Viking, 2017.

This is an excellent one-volume biography of one of the most remarkable presidents of the 20th century. He was elected in the depths of the Depression, and persevered through three re-elections into the depths of World War II before finally succumbing to long-term health issues in the spring of 1945. It’s an extraordinary career for anyone, but especially for a vigorous man struck down with crippling polio that limited him the rest of his life. He had to face legislative battles that included serious opposition from portions of his own party. He had a difficult marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, in part brought on by an early indiscretion. His New Deal attempted to turn the country around during the Depression, yet his policies were widely criticized and his legislative struggles prevented a successful recovery. It took the advent of the War to get the US economy back on its feet. But until Pearl Harbor, he had long struggles with vocal isolationists. The last years of his life were plagued with serious health issues that often left him weak and tired. But he oversaw some of the most difficult and trying years in US history, and worked hard on behalf of the US, even if his motives were often misunderstood or misrepresented. Dallek portrays the Roosevelt era with rich detail and convincing portraits of the many players that entered Roosevelt’s life.

Matthew F. Delmont. Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. New York: Viking, 2022. 

I always knew that African American men and women faced extraordinary challenges during and after World War II. But I had no idea of the extent and horribleness what what they faced until I read Delmont’s extraordinary history. The core irony is that African Americans willingly joined the fight against Fascism and Tyranny in Europe and the Pacific, all the while dealing with the horrors of Jim Crow policies among their American peers. All branches of the military were segregated, and there was widespread discrimination in everything from the kinds of duties that were possible, the kinds of honors given for bravery, and the kinds of treatments African Americans in uniform received at training centers throughout the US. Yet their contributions were heroic, and often essential for military success. Most supply missions were heavily staffed by minority soldiers, who often endured actual combat in making sure the front line soldiers had food, ammunition, machinery, and medical supplies. These efforts were key for D-Day in 1944, and the push through France toward Germany. They also contributed to the march through North Africa and up the Italian peninsula. They supplied the troops in the Pacific as they hopped from island to island toward Japan. They were members of the SeaBees who built airfields and other infrastructure to enable aviators to carry out their important work. But when they faced US civilians when on leave or when returning after their service, they were persecuted, and often lynched, while wearing their uniforms. When they were warmly greeted by English and French civilians, their white officers tried to impose Jim Crow restrictions in foreign lands. After the war was over, they were denied federal aid for education and housing. Even elite units like the Tuskegee Airmen faced fierce discrimination from other American airmen, who often denied they well-documented accomplishments. White reporters failed to write stories about their heroism and crucial contributions. President Roosevelt, nervous about election support in the south, failed to enact policies that could have reduced white racist behavior. It is simply one of the most shameful epochs in all of American history. 

Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2004.

—–. The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin, 2005.

—–. The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin, 2009.

        

These three volumes constitute Richard J. Evans’ majestic history of the Third Reich, from its beginning to its tumultuous ending. Drawing on numerous sources, these volumes trace the character and actions of the Third Reich in all of its many ramifications. Even if you’ve read a lot about World War II, and its origins and outcomes, you will be thoroughly rewarded by reading this comprehensive history.

John A. Farrell. Richard Nixon: The Life. New York: Doubleday, 2017.

I have no idea how many biographies of Richard Nixon there are. Before acquiring this one, I had six on my bookshelf (the real one). But this one is special. As Farrell points out in his Acknowledgements, a trove of new material has become available in the past few decades that give the biographer access to many new details of Nixon’s life. And, as those of us who have lived through most of his life know, it’s an amazing story. I don’t need to recount the stories here. One compelling element of this biography is that the complete set of Nixon tapes (minus some that contained highly classified material) has now been transcribed, so Farrell is able to quote the exact words of many of the participants engaged in the activities during Nixon’s presidency. But also, a number of diaries, notes, files, and other rich material have become available, making for a very engaging narrative. One story  that Farrell was able to confirm from new material is Nixon’s unlawful secret efforts during the 1968 election to persuade the South Vietnamese government to avoid the peace process initiated by the Johnson administration, under the assumption that Nixon would bring them a better deal if elected. He of course in the long run didn’t. The President elected to end the war in Vietnam instead prolonged it by almost five more years, at a huge cost in lives, internal dissent, and American goodwill. Farrell has a Nixon quote from his farewell talk to the White House staff that is so revealing: “Always remember, others may hate you — but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Niall Ferguson. The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.

This is a sweeping history (in more than 650 pages) of what Ferguson calls “the bloodiest century in history.” The centerpiece is World War II, but he starts at the beginning with the Japan/Russia conflict of 1905, all the way through the awful Balkan wars at the end of the century. In an Appendix he defends his claim about the century by comparing it with other terrible times in world history. All in all, it’s a marvelously detailed story of the many horrors of the century, including those domestic terrors of Stalin and Mao. Though I have already read a lot about the World Wars and other twentieth century debacles, there was much that was fresh in this portrayal. He takes to task some of the standard accounts of why it was such a terrible century, and focuses on three factors: economic volatility, ethnic disintegration, and the end of empires. 

Orlando Figes. The Story of Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2022.

This is an extraordinarily timely book. It traces the characteristics of Russia as a country/empire throughout its long history, and goes a long way to explain why we have Vladimir Putin today. Russia — either country or empire — has unusual characteristics. It is  huge. It is heterogeneous in culture and language. It has no real natural boundaries, especially in the west. Because of these characteristics, it has virtually always had an autocratic ruler. The czars were extreme autocrats, and were ruthless rulers, persecuting those who opposed them in very cruel ways. They were also under constant threat from the west and the south, and it took a long time to reach the Pacific on the east. With the fall of Czar Nicholas II  in 1917, there was a very brief flirtation with a non-autocratic regime, but it was quickly overcome by the Bolsheviks under first Lenin’s rule, and then of course Stalin. It’s long autocracy under the Communists has been documented in great detail. And its gobbling up countries on its Western border at the end of World War II was all in the service of its anxiety over its security. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 once again led to a brief flirtation with representative rule, but Figes points out that the absence of the elements of civil society made this period extremely volatile, and left the door open for Putin to emerge and restore autocratic rule. The current invasion of Ukraine once again reveals the anxiety about the security of the western border. And Russia continues to be the Russia that Figes so eloquently characterizes. 

David Fromkin. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt, 1989 [2009, with a new Afterward by the author]

Many times I have acquired a new book when someone refers to a title while giving a talk. I distinctly remember the occasion where that happened with this book. It was a talk by Madeleine Albright at the Michigan Business School many years ago. Fromkin’s book  languished, partially read, on my bookshelf for a long time, but I took it up recently and read it all the way through. The Middle East is an incredibly complicated place, and part of the problem with the years following the end of World War I was that the principals involved in making the peace, England, France, and the US, were woefully ignorant of the region. Fromkin particularly focuses on the British, who thought their mission was to govern via proxy the new states emerging in much of the Middle East. But the vast ignorance of the British, coupled with their arrogance, foiled any chance of a reasonable outcome. As Fromkin points out late in the volume, it took Europe 1500 years to migrate from the chaos after the fall of Rome to the emergence of stable nation states that we know today. European powers tried to impose their nation state model on all the parts of the world that they colonized, or desired to colonize. Almost nowhere did this work, and the Middle East is certainly a classic example. The book is incredibly detailed, but that level of detail is necessary to understand why the peace process following World War I ensured there would be no peace in this region for a long time (I’m tempted to say forever). Alas, governments seem to be forever making decisions without good understanding of the situation, and the 21st century has not brought any end to this horrible tendency.

Francois Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 

The illusion in question is the idea of communism, contrasted with the reality: communism thrived only as a one-party totalitarian dictatorship, whether in the Soviet Union or China or Cuba. It took root in poor, uneducated nations, and though it existed in reasonable numbers of places like France and Italy, it never reached a critical mass in such places. It’s historically ironic that fascism, the other dominant ism of the twentieth century, thrived in such highly educated and cultured countries like Germany and Italy. Furet is a dominant historian of the French Revolution, and it shows in this volume, in that he repeatedly compares the Russian Revolution with its French counterpart. Each has its own terror, though the Soviet version is so much more devastating and murderous. This volume was written (the original is of course in French) not long after the end of the Soviet Union, but before the rise of a new Russian totalitarian state under Putin. 

Masha Gessen. The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017.

This is an insider’s story of Russia from the era of Gorbachev to the total takeover by Putin. With the era of perestroika and glasnost followed by the ending of the Soviet Union and the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, Russia had a brief but unsuccessful flirtation with democracy. The emergence of the previously unknown Vladimir Putin to the leadership of Russia leads, inevitably perhaps, to the resumption of totalitarianism. Gessen lived in Moscow until Putin clamped down on gay people, including taking away children being raised by gay couples (as Gessen was). She leaves for the US, settling in New York City. She tells the story of this tumultuous period through the experiences of a modest number of people who are in various ways caught up in the events of this period. It’s an in-depth look at what happened, and how democracy failed and Putin succeeded. 

Masha Gessen. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012, 2014. 

This is an earlier, briefer account of the rise of Vladimir Putin, with somewhat more background about Putin himself and his earlier life as a pugnacious youth and later as a member of the KGB. The reference to not having a face in the title is about how unknown he was prior to being picked by Boris Yeltsin as his successor. His background provides insight into the characteristics of his ruthless leadership. 

Gillian Gill. We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals. New York: Ballantine Books, 2009.

This is the story of Queen Victoria and her husband and Prince Consort, Albert. The book has three parts. The first two trace the early years of Victoria and Albert, in that order, and the third covers their years together. They both had complicated childhoods and early adulthoods, she in England in association with the royal family, and he in Germany, as a minor royal on one of the then small German principalities. Their meeting was orchestrated by their respective families, they were indeed cousins, as it was common in Europe for royal families to be connected across nationalities. It wasn’t clear early on that they clicked, but when they did, Victoria, then already Queen, took the lead in proposing marriage to Albert. They were deeply in love with each other, and though the complex matters of state and questions about his role in that were central throughout their time together, their affections for each other were solid. Together they had nine children, and it was the burden of bearing them and giving birth that gave Albert an opening for a more serious role in the country’s affairs. He actually hoped to be a de facto King, but the reality of British politics interfered with this. But he was a dedicated public servant, engaging in a wide range of matters. One of the most notable was his oversight of the 1851 grand exposition held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Albert’s dedication to a large variety of projects in the end weakened him and he died in 1961 after just 21 years of marriage to Victoria. She ruled England for another four decades, but his memory was always with her. The story of their relationship is told in rich detail by Gill, and for me it’s a story about a couple working together, a project for which Judy and I have been gathering material for a number of years.

Malcolm Gladwell. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation and the Longest Night of the Second World War. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2021.

The Bomber Mafia refers to a subset of Army Air Force officers who thought that precision bombing was the key to military victory. They were led by General Haywood Hansell, and inspired by the invention of the Norden bombsight, which promised greater accuracy from high altitude bombing. The contrasting idea was wide scale carpet bombing, which in Europe was practised by the British. Following Hansell’s inspiration, an ultimately disastrous mission was launched against ball bearing factories in the German city of Schweinfurt, accompanied by an intended distracting mission against the city of Regensburg. Cloud cover prevented the use of the Norden bombsight, and effective German antiaircraft defenses decimated the US aircraft and their crews of both missions, with almost no damage to the intended targets. A subsequent second attempt at Schweinfurt had similar disastrous results. Nonetheless, Hansell continued to believe in his precision bombing idea, and when the capture of key islands in the Pacific made the bombing of Japan possible, using the new B-29 bomber, Hansell again tried his precision strategy, but it was undone by the bombers flying high enough that they encountered the little known jet stream that totally disrupted their accuracy. Hansell was soon replaced by Curtis LeMay, who altered the strategy, and employed newly invented napalm to firebomb Japanese cities without regard to military targets. The firebombing of Tokyo on a March 1945 night led to more than a hundred thousand deaths, mostly civilian. Such widespread destruction, followed in August of 1945 by the two atomic bombs, ended the Japanese war. Gladwell tells a gripping story, and ponders the morality of it all with incisive reasoning. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin. Leadership in Turbulent Times. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

The author has previously written about all four presidents featured in this volume: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Her goal is to draw lessons about what characterizes great leadership from the behavior of these four. Certainly there is little argument about Lincoln and the two Roosevelts that they were great leaders. In the case of Johnson, she focuses on his domestic achievements, but does not ignore the contrasting experiences he had with Vietnam. She openly discusses his failure of leadership there. The volume is organized in an interesting way. The first four chapters chart the early development of each of the four, in historical order. Then the next four describe the subsequent challenges of encountering great adversity, overcoming that, and ending up as President. Then four chapters review the leadership behavior of each, drawing out lessons that are called out in bolded headings. It’s a beautiful organization, and an eye-opening review of four styles of remarkable leadership. These are four extraordinary men, facing a series of major challenges unmatched in American history. Johnson is of course the saddest case. His extraordinary record of domestic accomplishments in the wake of his accession to the Presidency following Kennedy’s assassination is unmatched in our history. Yet his lack of interest and expertise in foreign affairs gets him dragged in to the quagmire of Vietnam. After he leaves the Presidency, in the tumultuous year 1968, Goodwin is invited to work with him on his presidential memoirs. She gets to witness first hand his simultaneous joy at his domestic accomplishments and his deep sadness about his experiences with Vietnam. Oddly, he does not so much regret what he did as the likely historical judgment of his actions. While Goodwin in her Foreword only briefly alludes to the present, one cannot help but contrast the characteristics of these leaders with the present occupant of the White House. Too bad he is unlikely to read this fascinating volume.

Doris Kearns Goodwin. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976, 1991.

Doris Kearns Goodwin had an unusual history with Lyndon Johnson. While still a PhD student at Harvard, she was worked in the White House as a student aide during the lame duck period of Johnson’s administration, after he had announced that he would not run for re-election. She soon was working directly with Johnson, and became quite close to him despite not agreeing with his policies on the Vietnam War. Shortly before he left office he invited her to work with him in Texas on his planned memoirs. He had wanted her to move there full-time, but as a budding new faculty member at Harvard she resisted, and he ultimately agreed to let her work part-time with him. But most weekends, and much of the summers, she ended up working very closely with him. He told her many stories about his life and his goals, providing her with a very unique perspective as a biographer. He only ever completed one volume of the planned three volumes of his memoirs, and he found even that task very disagreeable. And, barely four years after leaving office, he died at the age of 64. So this is a very special biography of one of the most interesting presidents of the twentieth century. He was lauded for his landmark civil rights and Great Society domestic programs, while at the same time widely attacked for his role in the Vietnam War. One feature of this biography is that it is very psychological, digging into the mind of Johnson for clues as to his behavior over a very long career in government: the House, the Senate, Vice President, and President. Johnson of course reappears in her more recent book on leadership, reviewed above.

Doris Kearns Goodwin. No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

This is the extraordinary story of the home front during World War II as embodied in the complexly intertwined lives of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The Roosevelt’s had an interesting relationship. When Eleanor discovered evidence of an affair that Franklin was having not long after they were married, it permanently altered their relationship. She asked for, and received, a measure of independence that she used her entire life. Especially after Franklin was elected President in 1932, she devoted herself to a broad array of social causes. The book focuses on the period beyond 1940, when Germany invaded the Low Countries and France, and threatened England. The US had a very strong isolationist tendency, with many feeling the country was lured into World War I that didn’t appear to have solved anything. Franklin knew it was likely we’d get involved in World War II, but up until the attack on Pearl Harbor, he constantly had to deal with the isolationists in Congress and beyond. He was able to establish the Lend-Lease program to help England (and later the Soviet Union), he reestablished the draft, and took other steps to begin to prepare for war, but when the Pearl Harbor attack came, the US was very unprepared to go to war. The ramp-up in the economy for war production faced many obstacles: labor strife, business reluctance, and a host of bureaucratic struggles. Meanwhile, Eleanor was devoting herself to such causes as women’s right to work, the status of blacks, the causes of war refugees, especially the Jews, and other related issues. She traveled and lectured extensively, and to the annoyance of many, hectored Franklin incessantly. She established many deep friendships with both men and women. Franklin also maintained a series of deep relationships with a series of women, who helped him with the stresses and strains of the Presidency. It’s a complex story, and Goodwin covers it in riveting detail. While I have read a lot about World War II, this is the first in-depth account I’ve read of what was really going on on the home front.

Doris Kearns Goodwin. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

There is an enormous library of books about Lincoln. I own a number of them, but this is the one that I found most remarkable. While the early history of Lincoln and his rivals is covered, the focus is on the period of Lincoln’s nomination to candidacy in 1860 up until his assassination. The interesting sequel is that Lincoln appointed all of his rivals to key positions in his cabinet. Asked why he did this, he replied, “We needed the strongest men in the party in the cabinet. These were the very strongest men.” While this resulted in conflict over policy and Civil War details, it was a remarkable strategy, and Kearns goes to great length to show how it resulted in good decisions in the long run. All in all, a remarkable portrait of a president dealing with the gravest threat to the survival of our country.

Garrett M. Graff. Watergate: A New History. New York: Avid  Reader Press, 2022.

This is the first complete detailed account of the Watergate story. While I have read many biographies of Nixon and other accounts of Watergate (e.g., All the President’s Men), this richly detailed history was a great read, as it presented all the players and events of a long and complicated story, starting with the publication of The Pentagon Papers which first spurred Nixon’s anxieties about leaks of his own suspect activities. Though much of the story is familiar, I did not previously understand where Mark Felt — who was the mysterious Deep Throat in the story — came from and his close ties to all that was going on with Nixon’s White House. The source material Graff had to work with was incredible, but the task was of course complicated by the COVID pandemic. 

David Gramm. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Random House, 2017.

In a costly irony of history, the Osage indians were given what seemed to be very undesirable land as a reservation, but was discovered to have oil underneath. The Osage became incredibly wealthy as a result. But in the early 1920s a series of unsolved murders began, and local authorities were seemingly incapable of finding the culprits. But as the murders continued, the relatively new Bureau of Investigation (to be later renamed as the FBI) took on the case under the newly appointed J. Edgar Hoover. Led by tenacious investigator Tom White, an undercover team persisted until they figured out the terrible conspiracy that lay behind the murders. Gramm recounts the series of murders, then describes in great detail the long investigation that ultimately led to the convictions of key participants in the conspiracy. He further uncovers surprises that surfaced just recently. It is, overall, a sad commentary on the terrible ugliness of the shabby treatment of native Americans in our history.

A.C. Grayling. The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century & the Birth of the Modern Mind. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

This book reviews the incredible range of personas active in the 17th century. It is a remarkable age, and Grayling’s claim is that it marks the transition from the earlier periods dominated by faith and authority to the modern view characterized by reason and observation. It was reading this volume, and Snyder’s book on Vermeer and Leeuwenheok, that rekindled my interest in the 17th century

 

 

Stephen Greenblatt. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

This book could have gone in several other categories on this bookshelf, but I put it here because of the central claims made by the author about how the matters described affected the course of the modern world. As happened to so many classical texts, the early Christians systematically purged the manuscripts that were inconsistent with their doctrines, and many such texts were lost forever. But this is the story of the rediscovery of one key such text, Lucretius’ long poem On the Nature of Things. Poggio Bracciolini, who was one of the great book hunters of the Renaissance, discovered a copy of Lucretius’ manuscript in 1417, which had been lost for over a thousand years. It’s central tenets — that there is no afterlife, that god does not deal with human affairs, that pleasure as well as virtue should be the central aim of life, and that the world was comprised of tiny particles (later called “atoms”) that moved constantly — were of course in direct conflict with Christianity, which itself was about to undergo the great turmoils of the Reformation. Though it circulated in Latin among scholars for several centuries, it was eventually translated into vernacular languages throughout Europe, and had widespread influence on such luminaries as Galileo, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. Lucretius was one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite authors, and the language in the Declaration of Independence that sought to guarantee “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a direct reflection of Lucretius’ values. Greenblatt’s rendering of this story is well-told, though I thought his characterization of the subsequent influences of Lucretius’ thinking could have been explicated in greater depth.

David Halberstam. The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. New York: Hyperion, 2007.

The Korean War was a huge gap in my knowledge of twentieth century history. David Halberstam did a masterful job of correcting this oversight. This history is especially rich in developing the backgrounds about the people involved on all sides and the character of the historical forces that were operating at the time. The conservative mantra about the loss of China played a big role, along with the emerging red scare. The wind down that followed the end of World War II left US military forces undermanned, ill trained, and underequipped. But a very major impact on how the war infolded was General Douglas MacArthur and his deeply flawed ideas about the various military forces and the overall strategies. The incredible collapse of US and South Korean forces at the beginning, where the North Koreans almost drove them off the peninsula, caught everyone by surprise. MacArthur’s one moment of genius in the war was the decision to land US forces at Inchon, behind North Korean lines, turned the tide, and led to the North Koreans being pushed all the way back to the 38th parallel. But then MacArthur made the biggest mistake of the war. He was intent on pushing United Nation forces (a number of other UN countries sent troops to Korea as well) all the way to the Yalu River, the boundary with China. He believed the Chinese would not enter the war, but of course they did, and some of the worst fighting involved US vs Chinese forces. His overriding of President Truman’s orders and the disrespect he showed for the US administration ultimately led to Truman removing him from command. Halberstam’s history focuses on the first year of the war. He covers the remaining two years briefly. But his rich scholarship about the people and events make this just exactly the kind of history I needed to correct this major gap in my knowledge of the century.

Victor Davis Hanson. The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

This is the kind of history that I love to read. It is thoroughly analytic, as opposed to chronologically or geographically organized. It goes into great detail about all the factors involved in the multiple wars that occurred  between the late 1930s and 1945. The plural “wars” is because Hanson points out that the different conflicts over the world were so different. The Western front in Europe differed dramatically from the Eastern front. North Africa and later Italy were in turn very different. The War of the Atlantic between German U-boats and British and American convoys and their escorts were very different. The island-hopping war of the Pacific was yet different again. And so forth. Therefore, the factors involved in the course of these different wars were often quite different. The section headings reveal Hanson’s analytic framework: Ideas, Air, Water, Earth, Fire, People, Ends. In each he breaks down in interesting detail what was involved, at what point. A common theme throughout is that the Axis Powers’ — Germany, Italy, and Japan — possibility of winning required quick and decisive victories that would lead the Allies to seek a negotiated peace. None of the Axis powers had the industrial and human resource capacities of the Allies. Turning points such as the Battle of Britain and Germany’s subsequent ill-conceived invasion of Russia, Japan’s decisive losses at Midway, and a number of others meant that the Allies’ great capacity to build weapons, ships, and aircraft in huge numbers had time to kick in. These high level bits are familiar. What makes Hanson’s narrative so compelling are the meticulously catalogued details. Though I had read extensively about World War II before reading Hanson’s tome, I learned so much from his analytic approach.

Max Hastings. Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

As Dan Russell has pointed out, I have read a lot about World War II. While there are many competitors for this “honor,” World War II is certainly up there as one of the most decisive events of the 20th century. And, if you wanted to read an excellent one volume account of the war, I would recommend this volume. Hastings is certainly one of the best military historians of this era, and this volume may be one of his very best. It is thorough (651 pages of text), and illuminating. There is great courage and great stupidity, on all sides. And the human cost is simply amazing. His figure is that the war cost 60 million lives — I’ve even seen estimates that go as high as 70 million. And those numbers are just the deaths. The horrible injured, the displaced, the incarcerated, only add more terrible numbers. I must agree with Hastings’s summary statement on the last page: “this was the greatest and most terrible event in human history.” Read his account for the excruciating details.

Max Hastings. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.

This is a comprehensive history of Vietnam, from the French struggles to keep their colony after the end of World War II to their defeat at Dienbienphu in 1954, the partition of Vietnam into North and South at Geneva, through the long US involvement (including supporting the French) to the end of the partition in 1975. The account is made all the more memorable because of the availability of North Vietnamese documents from the era as well as interviews and stories about participants on all sides of the tragic history. Among the fresh revelations are a detailed account of the Stalinist nature of the North Vietnamese regime and the terrible privations suffered by their citizens. Like Russia during World War II, the North Vietnamese were callous about the lives of their soldiers, and indeed they lost in the neighborhood of 1.4 million soldiers. There were incredible losses of civilian lives on both sides. And the fundamental tragedy of US involvement was that we allied with a corrupt, incompetent government that did not have the backing of its citizens. We witness in detail the turmoil of the Johnson administration and its entanglement in deceit and poor judgment. Hastings is especially condemning of Nixon and Kissinger prolonging of the war through five long years and 21 thousand more US deaths. Their relentless bombing of the North, which had no useful effect, only strengthened the resolve of North Vietnam to continue to their ultimate goal of reunification of the country. And of course, the threat of their ruthless, Stalinist principles led to hundreds of thousands escaping South Vietnam as the war ended. As is his style, Hastings spares no details. This is the most definitive account of this sad era in US history.

Simon Ings. Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016.

Science under the Bolsheviks, and Stalin in particular, has had a very stormy history, to say the least. Scientists, as intellectuals, were persecuted as members of the bourgeoisie. But when they contributed research in the service of Soviet goals, they were rewarded with lavish lifestyles (by Soviet standards) and rich support for their work. When science was relevant in the formulation of policy, ideology often trumped scientific rigor. For instance, the Bolsheviks thought evolution was a bourgeoisie science, pushed by the West, and this resulted in the marginalization of many biologists who felt that Darwin was right. In such a situation a pseudo-scientist like Trofim Lysenko, who denied the existence of genes and felt characteristics created in one generation could be inherited, was able to gain Stalin’s favor, with disastrous results for Soviet agriculture. But on the other hand scientists played a major role in World War II, developing weapons and technologies that had a significant impact on the course of the war with Germany. And after the war, Soviet scientists, under great pressure of course from Stalin, were able to develop first the atomic bomb and shortly after that the hydrogen bomb, aided in part by espionage of US efforts, but also as a result of the outstanding talent of Russian physicists. Ings tells these stories with rich detail and scope, and shows how conflicts of science and ideology can lead to all manner of trouble, a lesson that needs to be learned in our time.

Walter Isaacson. Kissinger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Henry Kissinger was one of the most visible statesmen of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in Bavaria in Germany, and he and his Jewish family were forced to escape from Hitler’s persecution in 1938. After a brief stay in London, the family moved to the US and settled in New York City, in the Washington Heights area. He enrolled in George Washington High School, and despite being a native speaker of German, did very well academically, even in  English. After graduating, he enrolled in City College of New York, where his academic achievements continued to be at the highest level. In early 1943, he was drafted into the Army. While he was in basic training in South Carolina, he became a citizen of the US. Because of his German language fluency, he became a translator-driver for a general, and participated in the Battle of the Bulge and the final push into Germany. He became an administrator for a captured German town and built up a civilian government. After the war ended, he was able to visit the town he grew up in. He was part of the occupying force that tried to restore order and begin the process of deNazification until the middle of 1947, when he finally returned to the US. He resumed his education at Harvard, 

Walter Isaacson. Leonardo da Vinci.New York: Simon & Schuster. 2017.

A biography of da Vinci could go in any of several categories in my bookshelf. I put it here because of his enormous historical significance. Probably most think of him as an artist, in particular, a painter. Many will think of him as an inventor, an engineer, a scientist. His famous notebooks are great literature. Isaacson has done a marvelous job of portraying da Vinci in all of his amazing varieties. He relies extensively on the extant 7200 pages of Leonardo’s notebooks, though it takes a lot of detective work to even work through them, as Leonardo seldom dated any of his entries. And the surviving pieces of the notebooks (likely only a part of them) are scattered in various places. But they are rich in detail about Leonardo’s enormous energy and curiosity. They are also filled with drawings that are themselves works of art. Isaacson repeatedly points out that Leonardo noticed things about the world that would not get picked up again for centuries. He explored anatomy, fluid dynamics, geology, astronomy, geometry, architecture, weaponry, and many more domains. Isaacson’s book is richly illustrated. He does engage Leonardo’s art in considerable critical detail, which I am not skillful enough to comment on. But it is a thoroughly engaging biography.

Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

The six men chronicled in this history had a huge impact on the form of the post-World War II world. Yet their story starts in the teens and twenties of the century, when they mostly attended prestigious prep schools and Ivy League colleges, and in most cases, got to know each other. The Wise Men: Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Kennan, and Charles “Chip” Bohlen. In the authors’ words, written for a new introduction in 2012: “In their time, they operated largely behind the scenes, little known by the public. But they achieved great things: the shaping of a world order; the creation of international institutions; the forging of a lasting peace in a perilous time. They were private men who avoided publicity but were comfortable with public power, not as an end in itself but as a force for prosperity, security, and freedom…. presidents from FDR to Richard Nixon counted on their wisdom.” The Marshall Plan, the World Bank, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and many other characteristic institutions of the “American Century” have the fingerprints of the Wise Men all over them. They served in many roles, both formal and informal. They were intimately familiar with Russia and its leaders. They advised European leaders. So much of the character of the second half of the twentieth century was shaped by them. But alas, the Vietnam War, perhaps unfairly justified by many based on earlier advice from the Wise Men, was the beginning of the undoing of their many efforts. This history traces the early development of the Wise Men and their contemporaries, and follows their actions and thinking throughout the Postwar World.

Julian Jackson. De Gaulle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

This is a major biography of one of the most important figures of twentieth century history. I had known a fair amount about de Gaulle’s presence in England during the war from having read biographies of Churchill and Roosevelt, but learned a lot even about that period from this very detailed account of his life. He worked very hard at ensuring that France would have a role in the process of ending the war and creating a postwar world. I knew even less about his career after the end of the war, despite having followed many of the events in the news. I knew he was a difficult person — both Churchill and Roosevelt disliked him, and though he had many loyal followers, he had lots of enemies as well. Controversy followed him throughout his career. But postwar France was what it was largely through his doing. He created the government framework that has been the Fifth Republic up to the present day. He was in charge during the Algerian war that led to the latter’s independence, yet with great controversy.. He was central to the creation of the Common Market, but also including twice vetoing British membership. There are many myths surrounding de Gaulle’s life and legend, and Jackson is masterful in his careful analysis of all of these. His biography is informed by access to extensive historical material in a variety of archives, which results in a rich narrative, often through the eyes and ears of the numerous people who interacted with de Gaulle. One is well rewarded for sticking with the story through all nearly 800 pages.

Lawrence James. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

India was a key part of the British Empire, and it’s history was incredibly complicated. British control emerged initially through the East India Company, subsequently aided by the British military. Even at its maximum, only about half of India was under British control. And throughout its history, violence kept recurring. There were many factions: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, various principalities, and of course the British themselves, both civil and military. Death and destruction were almost constant. There was a major Mutiny in the 1850s, put down violently by the British. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very unsettled. After World War I there were enormous disruptions, including the major massacre of civilians carried out by the British in 1919 at Amritsar. Gandhi, who had initially created a reputation in South Africa, came to India during the War and has an active figure in advocating for independence all the way up until it was achieved in 1947. There were complicated negotiations among numerous parties leading up to British withdrawal, the most eventful was the partition into Pakistan and India. All of this was again accompanied by violence. James’ story ends with the partition, but as we all know, the history of India has continued to be complex and often violent, even up to this day. This is a rich and detailed history, and informed me about a historical evolution that I did not know much about until I read this.

Lawrence James. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

The British Empire was often described as “the sun never stops on ….”. It spanned the entire globe, and even with the relatively early loss of the United States, was impressive. The British often claimed that they were merely temporary custodians of these places until education and experience would allow them to be independent. But this idea was at its heart racist, and the British thought of themselves as a superior people, and their behavior in their colonies was often reprehensible. Indeed, the history of the empire was filled with violence and tragedy. James’ account is detailed and masterful, and fully honest about the character of the Brits as overlords. I had never fully understood the extent of their empire, nor the details of their behavior. And, of course, today the empire is gone, and the British did not always leave the seeds of peace and success behind. 

Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin, 2005.

I have been alive during the entire period covered by this book though of course I was at best only partially aware of what was going on from the early 1950s. This is an extraordinary period in our history. Judt’s book rightly focuses on Europe, so the US only figures into the story now and then. But what a period it was. At the end of the war Europe was mostly in shambles. It took years to recover from the devastation of the battles and the bombing, from the decimation of economies and the huge debts rung up. The US Marshall Plan played an important role. By the late 1940s Europe was divided, and the Cold War was underway. There were repeated tensions and incidents, all covered in great and insightful detail by Judt. The emergence of NATO and the Warsaw Pact made the sides in the Cold War clear. The gradual emergence of prosperity in Western Europe and the terror and poverty of Eastern Europe unfold. Hungary is invaded by the Soviets in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. During this same time the European powers lost their colonies all over the world, transforming the nature of their economies and the balance of power. As a result, the western European countries began turning toward each other for markets and sources of strength. The gradual organization of most of Europe’s economies into the European Union unfolds throughout the 50s, 60s, and beyond. The culture wars and political rearrangements are traced in great detail. And, most surprising of all, is the decline and collapse of the Communist states, culminating in 1989 in much of Eastern Europe and, most surprising of all, in the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Most of these changes happened surprisingly peacefully. However, the great exception was the demise of Yugoslavia and the horrible, tragic Balkan wars of the 1990s. Following the fall of communism, the European Union underwent extensive enlargement, with new stress points and challenges. In the last chapter, he describes the growing disillusionment with the US among Europeans, especially during the George W. Bush presidency and the widely unpopular invasion of Iraq. Given that the book was published in 2005, one can only wonder what he would have written about the current Trump presidency re Europe. In a moving Epilogue, he explores the long and morally complex shadow cast over Europe by the Holocaust. In many ways, Europe did not handle its memory very well. Judt explores all of these events in insightful detail, portraying the many interesting figures involved as well as the ebb and flow of political, economic, and cultural matters. It once again reveals to me that I only know so much about what is going on during the times I have followed events in the news. We even lived in England in the 1989-90 period when so much was changing, but were only aware of small parts of it. I gained great insight from this massive (831 pages of text) and thoroughly engaging volume.

Ward Just.To What End: Report from Vietnam. New York: Public Affairs, 1968, 2000.

This book was originally published in 1968, though it covers the author’s experiences from December 1965 to May 1967. At that time we of course had no idea where the war in Vietnam was going. But Ward Just, covering it for the Washington Post, finds the whole affair confusing and frustrating. Knowing what we know now, we can see in his account the threads that would lead to the disaster that followed. But it’s so interesting to read an account from that era. The 2000 edition contains a reflective forward, but the text itself is unchanged from when it was written (ironically, while the author was in Ireland). The title is both prophetic and profound. What were we doing there, and why?

David Kenyon. Bletchley Park and D-Day: The Untold Story of How the Battle for Normandy Was Won. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.

This is a very important book about the history of Bletchley Park. As Kenyon himself says, Bletchley Park has often been characterized in earlier works as “the hutted, collegiate, informal organization.” The change he describes, which took place after 1942-43, when a lot of the intellectual work of figuring out how to decrypt German communications had been done (though by no means not all), is the emergence of a scaled up, more industrialized organization that produced key intelligence for the war effort. Indeed, by early 1944, as Operation Overlord was deep in its planning and scaling up phases, Bletchley Park was a very large organization of more than 7,000 people. The physical structure had dramatically changed from the early days, and the methods in place allowed for routine work (often quite boring) to be done by “staff without an Oxbridge level of education.” In his final assessment of Bletchley’s contribution to the Normandy invasion, the kind of intelligence derived from their work was key to the planning of the invasion. The time it took to decrypt material, which was in many ways remarkable, was not of a pace that would allow information to flow to the field during actual operations. But even after the invasion, Bletchley provided useful information about the movements of potential reinforcing German units as the battles unfolded. All of this insightful analysis by Kenyon was of course enabled by the declassification of a wide range of previously secret material that was not available to earlier writers who examined what Bletchley had done. The details of the very broad and important intelligence operations at Bletchley, their cooperation with US analysts and other British sources of intelligence, is covered in convincing detail. Indeed, one of the key observations is the contrast between the deep level of understanding of the Germans by the Allied intelligence operatives in contrast to the “significant misunderstanding” of the Germans about what the Allies were up to. The latter was a mixture of the obstinance and interference of Hitler, who had poor understanding of the Allies, and the chaos of German intelligence operations.

Maury Klein. A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

We all know that one of the keys to the outcome of World War II was the mobilization of US industry. While it indeed happened, and by the later stages of the war our industrial output was astounding, the road there was complex and in many ways frustratingly slow. It was a complex process, to be sure. How would it be managed? How could industries that had manufactured things for peace be transformed to make things for war? There were political complexities to overcome. There were reluctant CEOs. There was labor strife to resolve. Women and minorities had to be recruited, and often there were major relocations involved as people from rural areas moved to the cities. Maury Klein’s monumental history — nearly 900 pages of it — tells about all these complexities in what I found to be page-turning detail. The whole process turned a nation barely emerging from the Depression into the international superpower that dominated the second half of the twentieth century.

Charles A. Kupchan. Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

I guess I was historically naive, because until I read this historical account of isolationism in the United States I had no idea how deep and long-lasting an element of our national make-up this was. George Washington, in his farewell address upon leaving the Presidency, said “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” With a few exceptions, this held sway until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yes, we made an alliance with France to help beat the British in the Revolutionary War, but then not long after when the French asked us to help, we reneged. We fought the British in the War of 1812, but this was because the British were attacking our Navy’s ships and forcing our sailors to join the Royal Navy. The most serious departure from Washington’s warning was the Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century, where we evicted Spain from the Western Hemisphere, and took over their colonies in the South Pacific. But we soon soured on the cost of becoming ourselves a colonizing power, and until the end of 1941 resumed our isolationist pose. For sure we had widespread economic relations with the world, but these were very different from military alliances. World War II changed us, and we became major international players, only beginning to back off on this after the fall of the Soviet Union. Donald Trump with his American First moves was the most striking practitioner of this isolationist position, but even he had difficulty extracting us from our seemingly endless engagements in the Middle East. Kupchan’s final advice is that the US should adopt a middle ground, maintaining relationships with Europe and Western Asia, but not getting as involved as we have been in the Middle East or other parts of the world. Joe Biden’s ascent to the Presidency is certainly putting a curb on Trump’s most extreme isolationist moves, but we’ll see where this all goes in the coming decades. 

Jill Lepore. These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: Norton, 2018.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words, from the Declaration of Independence, are central to this history of the United States. That these words have been violated throughout US history is central to Lepore’s story. Even the US Constitution counts blacks as only 3/5th of a person, with no rights, that even the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution has never fixed in reality. And women are not mentioned at all in the Constitution, and still do not have equal rights before the law — with women themselves surprisingly opposing adding an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. So despite all the lofty language in our founding documents, our history is very flawed, and Lepore explicates all these, tracing our story from Columbus to Trump. One surprising thing she pointed out is that our Constitution has never served as a model for any other emerging independent country. And to this very day the world is puzzled by our racially motivated Electoral College, which keeps electing Presidents who are not approved by a majority of voters.

Jill Lepore. If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. New York: Liveright, 2020.

I don’t recall ever hearing of the Simulmatics Corporation, which existed from 1959 to 1970, while it was in existence. But Jill Lepore, who found out about it while writing her great history described above, decided to tell its story in detail in this highly engaging volume. The company was founded by a group of social scientists, whose aim was to use computing to model and predict human behavior. It was used to predict election outcomes, to sell a wide range of products, and to predict counterinsurgency strategies in the Vietnam War. But its rapid rise was matched by its rapid fall, as it folded in bankruptcy at the end of the 1960s. But its goals anticipate what we’ve seen subsequently with Google, Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica. It’s an altogether spooky story.

Erik Larson. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. New York: Crown Publishers, 2015.

The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915 was an event that stunned the world. Larson’s gripping account of the event, both the factors leading up to it and the sequelae, makes for engaging reading. So engaging, I might add, that this is almost the only book I’ve ever read on-line (I have an overwhelming preference for the old-fashioned, paper varieties). The tragedy of the event is of course magnified by all the twists and turns that could have led to its prevention. British intelligence knew a lot about the location of U-20, the boat that carried out the sinking. No protective destroyers escorted the Lusitania even though the Royal Navy knew U-20 was lurking. No preventive zig-zagging was carried out by the Lusitania. The captain of the ship held a naive view of the unlikely threat to a civilian ocean liner. Larson is a master storyteller.

Fredrik Logevall. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2012.

This book traces the history of France’s involvement with Vietnam. It was of course an overseas possession of France, part of its empire. But it was troubled, and led to a prolonged conflict, ending when the French lost a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu. Previously unknown to me, the US was involved throughout this history. It begins in 1919 at the Versailles treaty talks that followed World War I, when Ho Chi Minh made an unsuccessful attempt to achieve Vietnam’s independence. Woodrow Wilson, the US President, refused to consider it. Throughout France’s war in Vietnam, the US provided military aid, without which the French could not have sustained their long and ultimately unsuccessful struggle. The US was a key player in the Geneva negotiations in 1954 that led to the split of Vietnam into North and South at the 17th parallel. A key part of these negotiations was the US role in keeping the peace in southeast Asia. By the late 1950s Ngo Dinh Diem visited Washington to appeal to Eisenhower for support of South Vietnam. The first US advisers in Vietnam are killed in 1959. And, of course, the story escalates in the 1960s and beyond, not part of this volume. Logevall covers in elegant detail all of the multiple story lines that ultimately lead to our long and very unhappy involvement.

Fredrik Logevall. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956. New York: Random House, 2020.

This is the first volume of a projected two-volume biography of JFK. And why do we need another one? There are numerous biographies of this man.  But the author points out that they come up short on uncovering a deeper story about the man himself, his background and how his characteristics that we all know about emerged. I’ve read a number of his earlier biographies, but I certainly learned some  new things reading this one. I did not fully know the extent and the seriousness of his health problems. In the period covered in this volume, he has given last rites twice. And while we all knew he was a womanizer, I again did not fully understand the extent of this, and how it even continued after he married Jackie. This is a characteristic he learned from his father, who was also a well-known womanizer. JFK was also deeply interested in foreign affairs, and read widely and traveled extensively to learn more about the world. His books, While England Slept and Profiles in Courage, received lots of attention. This volume takes us up to the 1956 presidential election, where he got a lot of attention during the Democratic convention. It ends with his decision to pursue the presidency seriously in the next election, 1960. But the details of that story will emerge in the second volume.

 Margaret MacMillan. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2001.

This is a detailed history of the Versailles peace treaty process, an event that most agree changed the course of 20th century history. Indeed, its repercussions are still being felt, especially in the Middle East. MacMillan richly portrays the many significant figures in the drama. While she agrees that the six months of the treaty deliberations had long-lasting effects, she believes it is too simple to blame everything that happened in the century on what happened here. But it certainly laid the groundwork for all of the actors and events that came later, whether it’s the rise of Hitler in Germany, the rise of Japan in the east, the emergence of Israel and all the chaos in the Middle East, the control of eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, and even key events in the US.

Howard Markel. The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek. New York: Pantheon, 2017.

John and Will Kellogg were two remarkable figures in twentieth century America. John studied medicine, and became a famous physician, author, and the founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium (known as “the San”). The younger Will worked for many years as essentially the business manager of the San. John tormented will as a child, and the animosity between the two matured into lifelong battles as they collided repeatedly. John treated will terribly while the latter worked at the San. Together they experimented with making a breakfast cereal that would not require laborious cooking, and the result was the toasted corn flake. Will left the San to found the Toasted Corn Flake Company of Battle Creek, and his business acumen resulted in a company that grew and flourished. But not without constant hectoring and even lawsuits from his brother John. While John made a lot of money from the San, he also was generous with allowing those unable to pay to come there, and supported many charitable activities. Will ultimately created the William K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest such entities in the US (and incidentally, played a major role in the emergence of the School of Information at Michigan). John became heavily involved in the eugenics movement, and was a major player in the Race Betterment Foundation. The author is a medical historian, and is able to tell this story with accuracy and insight. 

Kati Marton. The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Angela Merkel was born and raised in communist East Germany, and her early career was as a PhD chemist. But following the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany, she shifted her focus to politics, ending up as one of the longest serving Chancellors of Germany. Her period in office had many challenges: dealing with Barrack Obama and Emmanuel Macron, and the even bigger challenges of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump But she emerged as the de facto leader of western Europe, and was widely admired for her remarkable leadership skills. Marton had access to many of those closest to Merkel, as well as to rich documents, all of which enabled her to paint a memorable portrait of an amazing twenty-first century leader.

Evan Mawdsley. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2–5.

Until I read this book, I had no idea about the scale of the war in the east. Our usual understanding of World War II is so colored by the American view of things. But the struggle between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was of a size and extent that is simply staggering. There is no question in my mind that Germany lost the war because of its invasion of the Soviet Union and the resulting monumental engagements in the east. Of course the whole struggle developed in such a strange pattern. When Germany invaded in the summer of 1941, they marched almost all the way to Moscow and other key cities in astonishing fashion. But with the onset of winter, their progress stalled, in part because they had never expected that things would last that long and they were ill-prepared for the bitter winter weather. And of course the stalemate and ultimate loss at Stalingrad was the decisive turning point. By that time Soviet industry, aided by the US Lend-Lease program, was producing war materiel on a huge scale. And the Red Army leadership and the incredible commitment of unbelievable numbers of troops turned the tide. The scale of eastern battles, including gigantic tank battles, was just simply incredible, like nothing that happened on other fronts. The losses in men and materiel were unbelievable. Soviet losses were roughly 10 million men, and in addition, an estimated 17 million civilians were killed. German losses were roughly 3.5 million men killed in the east. As a point of comparison, total British losses during the war were 380 thousand, American losses were about 400 thousand. There were months on the eastern front when the Germans and Soviets each lost more men than either of these figures. It was just an incredible carnage. And Mawdsley covers these matters in gripping detail.

David McCullough. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

During the nineteenth century many Americans went to Paris, some repeatedly, and some more or less permanently. Many of them were writers or artists, and many sought medical education in the world’s leading hospitals. Many were profoundly changed by the experience. The list is impressive: Mark Twain, James Fennimore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel F.B. Morse, James Whistler, Charles Sumner, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassett, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. I was surprised to learn that Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, was in Paris primarily as a painter. Cassett was a member of the crowd of painters who became the Impressionists. There were a series of major Expositions (1867, 1889, 1900) that were heavily attended by Americans. The Eifel Tower was created for the 1889 exposition, and was roundly criticized by French artists and writers, but was wildly popular with visitors. Paris underwent profound changes in street layout and architecture under the reign of Napoleon III. The Franco-Prussian War led to an extended siege of Paris (1870-71), with widespread suffering and death. Afterwards the Paris Commune created more death and destruction. McCullough is of course a master story teller, and the book is an engaging history of a remarkable period in both American and French history.

Lisa McGirr. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.

This is an eye-opening account of what is perhaps one of the most disastrous legal actions in the history of the US. By banning the sale of alcohol, the 18th amendment unleashed a host of unintended consequences. It is widely known that this gave rise to organized crime. But it gave rise to a major expansion of the federal government in law enforcement. And the law was enforced disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Indeed, even the lawmakers who passed or supported the amendment had access to alcohol in speakeasies and other covert sites. Such discriminatory enforcement led to the rise of an electoral base that helped FDR gain the White House. It also led to the emergence of vigilante groups who worked “in cooperation” with the federal agents, and among other things, led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had almost disappeared after the enforcement of laws against lynching. McGirr’s excellent book is full of the details of these and other aspects of the Prohibition era.

G.J. Meyer. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918, New York: Bantam Books, 2006.

This is an excellent one-volume history of the Great War, and is the perfect companion to Meyer’s book about the US in the same war, summarized in the next entry below. This is a somewhat unusual history in that his narrative is strictly chronological, which means he covers simultaneous events at the same time, even if they are widely separated. This makes it some what easier to get a feeling for the overall flow of this horrible conflict, and the interactions among the different geographic sites. He also has frequent chapters entitled “Background,” in which he fills in pictures of different people and places that provides extremely useful context about the players and the places. It still startles me to read about the stupidity of many of the players, their inability to adapt to the circumstances of the war, to learn from successes as well as failures. The repetition of foolish strategies chewed up millions of lives,, often to no purpose other than the vanity of generals and politicians.

G.J. Meyer. The World Remade: America in World War I. New York: Bantam Books, 2016.

Every once in awhile one reads a book that shakes one’s ideas to the core. This has been such a book for me. I have, over the years, read a lot about World War I. But everything I read was about the war in Europe, or the war in European spheres of interest like the Middle East. This book focuses on what was happening in the US. The US did not formally commit to the war until April of 1917 (the war had begun in August 1914). It did not get involved in combat until almost a year later, and only in the fall of 1918 were US troops led by US generals engaged in serious offensives. It is likely that this late involvement had a decisive effect. Even more decisive, however, was the US’s financial and materiel support of the Allies (Britain and France, primarily), and Britain’s morally indefensible blockade of food (and of course military supplies) to Germany. The latter led to widespread deaths via starvation of civilians. The story as told by Meyer principally involves Woodrow Wilson. I had not known much about him before, though I had a vaguely positive image of him. After all, I had been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in graduate school, and liked the work of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, to which I have occasionally given money. But the Wilson of Meyer’s depiction is incredible. He was a self-centered, idealistic man whose goal was to bring peace to the world by figuring out how to be at the center of whatever kind of peace process came at the end of this vicious war. He was stubborn, isolated, and inflexible. One reading is that after years of US propensity to stay out of the war, he finally realized that if he was to have a role in the peace, he would have to have the US involved in the defeat of Germany. And then he almost single handedly wrecked the Versailles peace process. His insistence on unwavering support for his idea of a League of Nations led Britain and France to negotiate for ever harsher terms for Germany and better deals for themselves. His continued unwavering support for the League of Nations in the form he wanted led to the US Congress rejecting US involvement in it. He was unable to negotiate, compromise, or work with others. It cost him politically and personally. He was also maniacal about those who opposed him on any grounds, and it lead to the gravest abuses of the Bill of Rights probably ever. All manner of innocent people were caught in the webs of his zealous minions who accused anyone who disagreed with Wilson of treason, with jailings or sometimes even worse. Interestingly, this climate also lead to the 18th Amendment and Prohibition, followed up with the repressive Volstead Act. It also, somewhat paradoxically, eased the way to women’s suffrage. Having only read this account of these events, I am motivated to look into other biographies of Wilson and other histories of what was going on in the US at this time. But I have to say, I have somewhat different feelings about my own past as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.

Simon Sebag Montefiore. The Romanovs: 1613-1918. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

This is a detailed history of the family that ruled Russia for more than three centuries. And what a mostly terrible time those three centuries were. The Romanovs were violent, venal, and autocratic. They oversaw eventful epochs in Russian history, including many wars, including Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the early nineteenth century. And of course the reign of the Romanov’s ends with the 1917 Russian Revolution that ended with the Bolsheviks creation of the Soviet Union and the murder of the entire family of Czar Nicholas II.

Liza Mundy. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. New York: Hachette Books, 2017.

This volume nicely complements other recent accounts of women’s role in providing key mathematical insight into major historic moments (e.g., Hidden Figures, reviewed in the Science and Technology section). Mundy traces the stories of the women who were recruited to help crack the secret communication codes of the Axis powers during World War II. Both the Army and the Navy recruited bright graduates from mostly eastern colleges, though as the war went on they expanded their catchment areas westward and southward. As many as 10,000 women were recruited. And on the whole, they were excellent and essential. Initially the Navy focused on the Pacific War, and even by the time of the Battle of Midway in 1942 has cracked essential Japanese codes. This continued throughout the war, and played a huge role in the US demolishment of the Japanese supply lines. It also aided in naval battles and the island-hopping of the Army and Marines. The Army focused on Europe. Of course the British had their own effort that focused on the breaking of the German Enigma code. But they eventually called on the US to help with this, and the US women involved played key roles in cracking the four-rotor Enigma that befuddled the Allies during the disastrous 1942-43 convoy losses. Another development was the change of heart of the military in allowing women to serve: the WACs for the Army, and the WAVES for the Navy. Interwoven throughout are the individual stories of the different women, their contributions, their daily lives, and the men they met and married. Though many women left these efforts at the end of World War II, a number continued their work as the Cold War emerged. One of the interesting stories is about how the women helped the Allies develop unbreakable codes (which indeed weren’t broken), and how they participated in the circulation of false intelligence leading up to D-Day. The women were of course sworn to secrecy, and for years did not reveal what they had worked on. Even when Mundy interviewed them shortly before the book was written, many were reluctant to talk.

David Nasaw. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

This is a thorough, magestorial biography of one of the richest men ever in the US. He was a ruthless business man, accumulating wealth through a variety of unsavory practices. But then at a relatively early age, he decided to give his fortune away for the betterment of humanity. He was also a meddlesome political force, gaining favor by supporting Republican candidates, but annoying them with his often naive goals of furthering international peace. He married late, but then had a satisfying marriage. He had residences in many places, building a castle-like mansion in his native Scotland, and a large home on Fifth Avenue and ninety-first street in New York City. Nasaw is a masterful biographer, correcting numerous mistakes by earlier biographers, and portraying the many facets of this interesting man through rich detals. 

 Craig Nelson. Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness. New York: Scribner, 2016.

2016 marked the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There has been a flurry of books and articles appearing as a result. Nelson’s book is just one of them, but it happens to be the one I picked up at a bookstore and read. Unlike earlier accounts, like Walter Lord’s famous Day of Infamy (1957), Nelson’s account (and I’m sure the others appearing as a result of the anniversary) had access to a rich array of archival material: diaries, government records, transcripts, notes, on both sides. As a result, we get a much more nuanced account of the whole event. There was enormous conflict on the Japanese side about whether to do this at all, and the fact that diplomacy was still in progress at the moment of the attack is symptomatic of both the conflict and the ineptitude on the Japanese side. Similarly, the fact that the US was caught unprepared was evidence of much conflict and ineptitude on that side. There were widespread doubts that the Japanese were capable of such a thing, a reflection of deep cultural biases among many in the military and the government. As a result, warnings based on intercepted cable traffic that such an attack was possible, those who could have done something ignored the warnings and made no preparations. The diaries and personal accounts of participants on both sides add a level of richness absent in earlier accounts. And, of course, in the end, Admiral Yamamoto’s fear — he planned the attack despite being deeply opposed to doing it — came true: it marked the beginning of the end of the imperialistic dreams of the militants who had gained control of the Japanese government.

Daniel Okrent. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010.

I learned long ago that it is usually valuable to read more than one book on a topic. I had earlier read the McGirr volume (reviewed above) on the Prohibition before I read Okrent’s account. The two books are very complementary. Okrent focuses much more on the vast array of characters who populated the “wet” and “dry” elements of the debates about Prohibition and its repeal. It’s a fascinating story. The circumstances that led to the perfect storm that created the 18th amendment, and the later perfect storm that led to its repeal, are told in page-turning detail. Okrent’s talent for making the rich array of characters interesting is admirable. To me, perhaps the most amazing aspect of the story is that despite all the crime and hypocrisy that accompanied Prohibition — even many of its supporters drinking freely, for example — the net result was a reduction in alcohol consumption. Even after repeal, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the pre-Prohibition levels of alcohol consumption were briefly matched, and even then fell off. And the Canadian Sam Bronfman, one of the most successful of the purveyors of illicit drink, said that there was only one explanation for what happened during Prohibition: “You people were thirsty.”

Kathryn S. Olmsted. Right Out of California: The 1930s and The Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. New York: The New Press, 2015.

The 1930s were a tumultuous time, and especially so in California. Farm laborers in California’s central valley were poorly paid, poorly housed, and often persecuted by the owners of the vast, industrialized farms. In this milieu, eager American Communists saw an opportunity to create a movement for worker equality. Strikes were organized, and there were often violent confrontations with company-hired vigilantes. The police, the Highway Patrol, and the courts were all on the side of the companies. There were murders, jailings, and other forms of persecution. When the strikers were successful, the owners of the farms were concerned. From this emerged the characteristics of the conservative movement — a rhetoric based on anti-communism, family values, and religion. They courted evangelical Christians by scaring them about the godlessness of communism. When the Democrats nominated Upton Sinclair to run for governor, the Republications engaged a new firm, Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting company in the US. They manipulated the flow of information, using out-of-context quotations from Sinclair’s writings to frighten voters. Olmsted argues that out of this turmoil emerged the corporate roots of conservatism that continues to this day. She tells the story through numerous colorful personalities and the many tumultuous events of the 30s. In a final chapter she traces the threads trough Nixon, Reagan, and later Republican figures. Along the way we see the emergence of the ACLU, the literature of Langston Hughes and John Steinbeck, and diffidence of the Roosevelt administration to what has going on in California. It’s a fascinating story.

Lynne Olson. Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour. New York: Random House, 2010.

Lynne Olson has produced some of the best books about the war in Europe. You see reviews of others below, and more will be coming. This one focuses on the Americans who were in London during the war, both before and after the US involvement. There are three focal figures: Edward R. Murrow, the broadcaster for CBS radio who revolutionized news broadcasting (see the The Murrow Boys, above), Averell Harriman, who was assigned to England to administer the Roosevelt administration’s key Lend-Lease program (though he did a lot more than that), and John G. Winant, the US ambassador to England who became perhaps the most beloved US person by the British ever to serve in the UK. Many other figures appear in the story as well, but these three keep coming back. Having read The Murrow Boys, and having watched Murrow himself on TV in my youth, I knew a lot about his story. I had also read a biography of Harriman, a complex figure for sure, but he was familiar (although details emerged in Olson’s story that I didn’t know). But the figure who was new for me was Winant. He replaced Joseph Kennedy, the previous ambassador who was a staunch isolationist, and was extreme in his advocacy of keeping the US out of the war. Winant was the opposite. He began his tenure as ambassador in March of 1941, when England was in great peril. The fall of France in 1940, the Battle of Britain that followed, the Blitz, and the threat of invasion had left England on the doorstep of collapse. Yet when Winant arrived, he engaged the British people. During Nazi air attacks he wandered the streets of London, talking to ordinary people, encouraging them. He was remorseless in trying to get Roosevelt to engage, which was unsuccessful until Pearl Harbor. After the US became involved, he worked to smooth relations between the US troops arriving and the British populace. He became a close friend of Churchill, and other key British officials, especially Anthony Eden. He was honored and celebrated by the British, yet few Americans know of him. He committed suicide in 1947, lovesick for Sarah Churchill, with whom he had had a wartime affair, and frustrated at his lack of engagement in the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and other postwar developments. That part of the story brought tears to my eyes. I’m sure a lot of this is due to Olson’s engaging writing style.

Lynne Olson. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II. New York: Random House, 2013.

As the world turned once more to war, there was major debate in the US about whether we should get involved. As European nations fell, and the British were seriously threatened, President Roosevelt tried to convince Americans that it was our moral duty to support the British and perhaps even get formally involved in the conflict. However, there was serious pushback to this idea, triggered in part by widespread frustration that our involvement in World War I had in the long run not solved anything in Europe. The leading spokesperson for staying out of the new war was the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. The resulting fight was anything but gentlemanly. Both sides used dubious methods to discredit the other. For instance, some in the military worked to undermine Roosevelt’s support of Britain. Roosevelt, in turn, authorized wiretaps of Lindbergh, spied on antiwar groups, tried to besmirch the reputations of antiwar congressman,  and mounted serious efforts in the press to win over support for his policies. Lindbergh in turn was portrayed as a Nazi sympathizer. It was an ugly time, ended only when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the opposition to our involvement in the war dissipated. Lynne Olson portrays the characters and the often ugly actions in riveting detail.

Lynne Olson. Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

This fascinating volume traces the lead-up to the outbreak of World War II and the growing revolt against the leadership of Neville Chamberlain. I had not appreciated before what an ogre Chamberlain was. His was single-minded, if naive, about his hope to avoid war through appeasement, totally misunderstanding such people as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Through his heavy handed chief government whip, David Margesson, he used draconian measures to counter his opposition in Parliament. Nonetheless, a series of factions, initially operating somewhat independently, began plotting how to get rid of Chamberlain and put someone else into Downing Street. Churchill was not the favorite of any of these factions. But others, such as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, refused to take on a leadership position in opposition to Chamberlain, so Churchill emerged. But even he was  reluctant to counter Chamberlain, and in fact up until the very end, when Chamberlain resigned in light of the loss of support in Parliament, Churchill was defending him. But of course, once Churchill became Prime Minister, things changed rapidly. He marshaled the support of the British public to firmly resist Hitler and defend the homeland. His stirring speeches and strong resolve helped the British uphold their spirits in light of the losses on the Continent and the Blitz at home. Olson describes in great detail the colorful characters of this period and their struggles with how to best serve England during these crisis years.

Lynne Olson. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War. New York: Random House, 2017.

As country after country fell to the Nazis, their leadership fled to the as-yet-unoccupied England. Eventually, the leadership of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (actually, later Yugoslavia, but Olson does not cover that) ended up in the “last hope island.” Many military persons and civilians also fled to England. From the relative safety of England, they organized and monitored resistance movements in the occupied countries. They oversaw rescue networks for downed Allied flyers. They participated in military action. For instance, Polish pilots played a central role in the Battle of Britain and other later action. Forces from these countries played key roles in the invasions of North Africa, Italy, and on D-Day. While there were complicated relationships among these groups and the British government and intelligence services, much good came of the fact that there was organized long-distance oversight of activities in the occupied countries. And these relationships had much to do with the course of history after the war. The foundations for the European Union were formed, as was the British ambivalence toward being part of it. Olson covers an amazing array of activities and personalities involved in all of this. And, sadly, many international cruelties, such as the United States’ abandonment of Czechoslovakia during and after the war, are recounted. Leaders such as Churchill and Roosevelt had complex relationships with many of the figures who were in England, especially Charles de Gaulle. Though I have read a lot about World War II, this volume provided an essential perspective on important matters scarcely mentioned in most other histories.

Virginia Postrel.The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

This is an excellent instance of a historical genre that I really enjoy. The genre takes some ordinary thing from contemporary life, and traces its long history. This volume focuses on textiles. In an opening point that is quite memorable, Postrel claims that what we call the Stone Age could just as well be called the String Age. It was the making of firm string that made it possible to fasten a stone onto a piece of wood to make a club. String could be used to make nets that were used to carry things or capture food. But unlike stone, string does not survive very well, though some careful studies have confirmed its presence in that long-ago era. From such fibers came thread, and then cloth. With cloth came dyes. All of these things became core elements of early commerce, and indeed surviving records indicate that thread, fabric, and dyes were central elements of trade throughout recorded history. Hence the Silk Road. In modern times, new fabrics came from chemistry, as well as new dyes, with fabric being at the heart of the emergence of a chemical industry. And of course more recently the digital world and fabrics have been merged in various innovative ways. This fascinating history is rich in historical detail. It was a delight to read.

David Remnick. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993.

David Remnick was covering the events in Russia for the Washington Post during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras, during the tumultuous changes that led to the end of the Soviet Union, the liberation of eastern Europe, and the shaky emergence and then disappearance of democracy in Russia. As he is fluent in Russian, he was able to interview many people, read widely, follow television, and in general closely follow all the things that were going on. The result is a rich, detailed account of this most fascinating period. It starts in 1988 when he arrives, and ends in 1991 with the failed coup and the official end of the Soviet Union. In between he covers the ebbs and flows of events as Gorbachev struggles with trying reforms while not wanting to gut the Communist Party, and ends with Boris Yeltsin emerging as the first elected leader of Russia. He is able to meet with and interview most of the key players in all of this drama, and also travels widely to see how this is all playing out in different parts of this huge country. It is a memorable account of one of the most dramatic transitions in recent history.

David Remnick. Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia. New York: Random House, 1997.

This picks up the story that left off with the end of Lenin’s Tomb. It covers the period of Boris Yeltsin’s flawed presidency, and ends with his narrow re-election in 1996. The old-liners try to make a comeback, and the Communist Party makes some impressive gains in the 1995 Duma election. They nearly upset Yeltsin in 1996 but fall short when some of the new plutocrats decide that their fate hangs in the balance if they don’t support Yeltsin’s re-election. There is the dramatic confrontation in 1993 that Yeltsin is able to put down with the support of the military. But there is the terrible war in Chechnya, and other major events that shape the evolution of Russia’s ultimate failure to become a real democracy. What’s so amazing about both these books is there is never any mention whatsoever of Vladimir Putin, who of course emerges from all this as yet another autocrat to lead the Russian nation, but after the period covered by these two volumes. 

James Reston, Jr. The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.

This slim volume (main text: 181 pages) tells the gripping story of the Frost/Nixon interviews that aired in 1977. Reston was one of the three primary background researchers for David Frost, and tells the story from his perspective. There were doubts about whether Frost would be up to the task of confronting Nixon. The background researchers armed him with an incredible array of material. But in the early phases of the interviews, touching on domestic and foreign matters, Nixon came across as holding the upper hand. When the interviews turned to Watergate, the background researchers said we’ve got to go for the jugular. There was a week’s delay before this phase of the interviews took place, and there was frenetic preparation, including a number of potential surprises for Nixon based on material gleaned from the White House tapes and other sources. And, indeed, it worked. The Watergate phase of these interviews are the most compelling, leading to Nixon making apologies — in his own somewhat indirect ways, of course. And since Nixon had been pardoned by Gerald Ford, this was the only time that he was actually called on to defend his behavior during these events. Reston’s descriptions are fascinating, down to off-camera moments where Nixon made odd comments to those involved in the tapings. I remember watching the original interviews (40 years ago!), and recently watched an edited selection of the Watergate phase of them. Having Reston’s report on what was going on as they were being made lends useful perspective to those amazing times.

David Reynolds. In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War. New York: Penguin, 2004.

This book has one of the more interesting constructions that I’ve ever encountered. It’s topic is Winston Churchill’s writing of his six-volume history of World War II, which became an international best-seller and led to Churchill earning the Nobel Prize in literature. It interleaves multiple stories. First, there is the history of the periods covered by the volumes, as they were known at the time and as Churchill experienced them. There is the writing of the six volumes, itself a massive enterprise that employed dozens of assistants. There is the censorship of the volumes, both by the authorities (e.g., keeping the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park secret) and by Churchill (not wanting to offend historic figures he worked with, and of course making his role heroic). There is the critical reaction to the volumes as they were published. And there is the current view of what happened, informed by numerous sources that have been revealed long after the volumes were written. It’s a complex narrative, but handled brilliantly by Reynolds. Hw may be a bit harsh, as he continuously points out falsehoods in Churchills narrative. But Churchill is writing this while he is hoping to return to power, and is reluctant to offend those who are still active. And he’s trying to make himself look better than he may actually have been. But this narrative brings out all these complexities in great detail, and is indeed one of the highlights of the story It is one of my all-time favorite books about World War II, because it weaves together the terrible struggles of that war with the process of constructing a narrative and the reactions to that effort over time.

David Reynolds. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014.

2014 marked the centennial of the beginning of World War 1, or the Great War as it was known before there was a second world war. As so often happens on such anniversaries, it is an opportunity for reflection and a search for longer term meaning. Reynolds presents a detailed and well-informed look at how that war affected the entire century that followed. It’s a convincing set of arguments. Many have noted the lasting effects of the Versailles Treaty, in redrawing maps in several parts of the world that continue to have large effects on events. But Reynolds looks at a wider range of implications, on such topics as how the war was thought about by the various participants, how its participants are remembered, the effects on the arts and literature, and how a wide variety of subsequent conflicts beyond just the second world war were seeded by what happened in the first. While he discusses issues affecting all of the participants, he gives special attention to Great Britain, arguing that the effects there were quite different from what happened elsewhere. He argues that the end of the Cold War in 1991 marked a major turning point in the aftereffects of the Great War, since the Soviet Union and it’s impact on history is traced back to the 1917 Russian Revolution precipitated, in part, by Russias involvement in the war. All in all, the book is amazing in its scope and insights, and certainly gave me new understandings of a wide range of twentieth century events.

Richard Rhodes. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

It is widely believed that in the end the arms race did in the former Soviet Union. During the peak of this period, they were spending upwards of 40-50% of their gross national product on the military, at enormous cost to the domestic lives of their people. Crop failures and bad agricultural practices led to enormous expenditures on grain from abroad to minimize deaths by starvation. Again, accordingly to widely held views, Ronald Reagan’s defense spending increases, and in particular his commitment to a Star Wars anti-ballistic missile program (itself widely criticized at the time by US experts, and ultimately a failure) was the straw that broke the USSR’s back. But Rhodes also points out that the arms race had terrible effects on the US as well. Our decaying infrastructure, extensive poverty, terrible health care metrics, and a host of other major domestic problems all suffered because of our huge investments in defense as well. While these investments did not bring down our country, unlike the USSR, the downside effects persist to this day (even beyond this volume’s 2007 publication date). Rhodes, the author of two splendid volumes on the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, reviewed elsewhere here, provides a detailed history of the emergence, peak, and ending of the arms race, aided by numerous documents on both sides that became available to historians. The climax of the story is the relationship between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that culminated in a decisive summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986. It’s fundamentally a story of the folly, as he puts it, of thinking that massive overkill through extensive supplies of nuclear weapons was somehow an intelligent strategy. Ultimately, both Reagan and Gorbachev, over the objections of their conservative advisers, said enough already, and worked out an ending scenario to the madness. It’s a scary story — I had not realized how close we came to nuclear war in the fall of 1983 (I was distracted by my marriage to Judy that fall!). In many ways we are lucky that the period from the late 1940s to roughly 1990 did not end in a calamitous exchange of nuclear weapons. Rhodes is a master of telling the chilling story.

Andrew Roberts. Churchill: Walking with Destiny. New York: Viking, 2018.

Winston Churchill is of course one of the major historical figures of the 20th century, and this magnificent biography (all 982 pages of it) does true justice to the complexities and nuances of his long and eventful life. He is well regarded for his oratory skills, and his sweeping sense of humor. But he was also a very controversial figure, as reviled as he was admired. His career is full of mistakes, many serious, that Roberts examines in detail. But as Roberts points out, one of his strengths was his ability to learn from his mistakes, a quality that served him especially well in the tumultuous years of the Second World War. He was a prolific and tireless author, writing more than many purely literary figures. Interestingly, his writing was his primary source of income throughout his life. To deal with the unbelievable stress he faced, he took up painting and many found his works of surprising quality. He loved his cups, but as Roberts points out, he was not a drunkard, as he somehow had an amazing capacity to imbibe and yet keep his wits. He took many risks, and always felt he would die young, yet lived to be 90. His life centered on being a Member of Parliament, yet he had many years of being out of power while always coming back. He had a complicated family, with its share of tragedy and disappointment. Roberts takes great pains to stress how much his life was influenced by his own unhappy relationship with his father. There are also the complexities of his relationships with Roosevelt and Stalin during the war, and of course a host of British political figures throughout his life. All in all, this one of the best and most interesting biographies I’ve ever read, and that’s saying a lot, as my reading in this genre has been wide and deep.

Eugene Rogan. The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

So much history of The Great War focuses on the European theaters, and the tragic consequences for European history triggered by the Versailles Treaty ending that war. But of great consequence for the present day is what happened in the Middle East, and what tragic implications for subsequent history the outcome of that war had for the 20th and now 21st centuries. Rogan’s volume covers the very different war that took place in the Middle East, leading to the ending of the centuries old Ottoman Empire. The carving up of Middle Eastern geography by the European powers has catalyzed the many tragic struggles that have swept this region ever since. The Fromkin volume reviewed above provides a nice companion to this book.

Steven J. Ross. Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

With the rise of Hitler in Germany, Nazi sympathizers in southern California began organizing, with support from the German regime once they came to power in the early 1930s. The Nazis were interested in Los Angeles for several reasons. They viewed Hollywood as dominated by Jews, and they wanted to keep anti-Nazi themes out of Hollywood movies. They also recognized that there were very strong anti-semitic sentiments among the citizens of southern California that they hoped to exploit. Finally, security at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach was much more lax than on the East Coast, so it was much easier to smuggle arms, money, and Gestapo agents in. All this led to highly organized pro-Nazi and anti-semitic organizations throughout southern California, but especially in Los Angeles. Recognizing this, Leon Lewis, a Jewish lawyer by trade, became an effective spymaster. He recruited non-Jews to become spies of the variety of organizations that were springing up. Lewis’ effectiveness contrasts with the lack of attention given to such matters by local police, the FBI, and military intelligence. Indeed, many of these latter organizations were themselves infiltrated with anti-semitic and pro-Nazi followers. Lewis’ spies surfaced much startling information: plots to assassinate leading Hollywood figures, to sabotage defense plants throughout Southern California, to prepare armed militia for eventual support of Hitler’s invasion of the US, and to target Jews for violent reprisals. The details of how Lewis’ spies carried out their very dangerous work is described by Ross in compelling detail. They were especially effective in exploiting internal conflicts in the groups, often leading to the abandonment of their nefarious plans. The beginning of US involvement in the war following the Pearl Harbor attack led to incarceration of many of the pro-Nazi principals that Lewis’ spies had followed. But it also led to a growth of anti-semitic sentiments among the greater southern California public, who felt that Roosevelt and his Jewish advisers had gotten us into the war to further Jewish aims. It’s a complex, and in many cases, sad story that Ross tells. But it’s an encouraging example of what even a modest number of committed citizens can do to forestall the effects of hate.

 James M. Scott. Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid that Avenged Pearl Harbor. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.

This book is like the one above about the Berlin Airlift (The Candy Bombers). It’s about an iconic historic moment that is usually remembered as a heroic endeavor by brave Americans. It is that, for sure. But reading this account embeds the event in its historic context, and it’s a much more complex, and therefore more interesting, story. For sure there are brave and heroic figures involved. But there are numerous tragic moments, such as the vicious revenge for the raid that was taken out on occupied China by the Japanese troops, the puzzling long-term imprisonment of the crew of the one bomber that landed in the Soviet Union, the ordeal of the two bomber crews that were captured by the Japanese, and the complex stories of those who eventually made it back to the US. There is the give-and-take of public stories about the raid, on both sides, with the actual facts about the raid eventually first disclosed by the Japanese rather than by the Americans, the latter who got tangled up in confusing principles of secrecy. This book is a good example of why most of my reading is about history — there is always much more going on in events than one realizes.

Neil Sheehan. A Bright Shining Lie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989.

This is an especially interesting account of the Vietnam War. Sheehan spent a lot of time there as a reporter. He also centers this narrative around John Vann, a fascinating figure in the war, first as an Army officer in the early 1960s, and then later as an AID adviser which led to him achieving military leadership in the late 60s and early 70s. He felt the strategies of the Army leadership under Generals Harkins and later Westmoreland were totally misguided, as they tried to work with the corrupt South Vietnam governments and the totally inept South Vietnamese army, pursuing a losing strategy of trying to annihilate the Communist Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military, ignoring an thoroughly alienating the South Vietnamese civilians. He tried repeatedly to change the minds of the American leadership, but failed. He was deeply frustrated by the South Vietnamese army, that repeatedly refused to obey the advice of the local Americans in the field, often plagued by corruption and wide scale desertion. The level of detail is convincing. Vann died in a helicopter crash in mid 1972. 

Philip Shenon. A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. New York: Henry Holt, 2013.

For people of my age,  the Kennedy assassination was the first of, sadly, a long series of traumatic national or international events. It totally broke us out of the complacencies of the 50s and the early fantasies of the 60s. Indeed, it was a harbinger of a turbulent decade. And few events have been surrounded by as many rumors and accusations. In this detailed book by Philip Shenon, the whole history of the event and its endless sequelae are reviewed in depth. The investigation that followed it, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, was deeply flawed. Warren himself prejudged the outcome at the beginning, and was little interested in following up leads. Many tantalizing threads were uninvestigated. Various agencies like the FBI and CIA had information that was never shared with the Warren Commission. Key evidence was destroyed. It’s a complex and sad story, and there is sufficient evidence that if information had been properly shared, the whole sorry affair might have been prevented. It’s a frustrating yet interesting story.

William L. Shirer. The Nightmare Years: 1930 – 1940. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1984. 

William L. Shirer, whose complete biography by Cuthbertson and whose briefer biography by Wick are reviewed in this place, wrote a three-volume memoir, of which this is the middle volume covering the critical decade in his career. After graduating from college in the mid-1920s, he went to Europe, initially to Paris. This volume covers the decade in which Adolph Hitler rose to power, and he ends up covering this as both a print journalist and then as a radio journalist for CBS radio. He finally leaves in 1940 when it becomes impossible for him to cover events because of Nazi censorship. While I was already familiar with much of the events and his reactions to them during this period from the two biographies mentioned, it is very insightful to read his account. This memoir was written in the 1980s, long after the events themselves. But he kept meticulous diaries during the earlier years, plus kept copies of letters, drafts of his radio reports, and other materials, giving him rich resources with which to write his memoirs. The very last chapter recounts his experience in 1945 of visiting the war-torn cities of Germany and then covering the Nuremberg war crimes trials. His characterizations of the people involved in these times are especially noteworthy. 

Bob Spitz. Reagan: An American Journey. New York: Penguin Books, 2018.

This is a detailed, superb biography, exactly the kind I most enjoy reading. Acquiring it and reading it immediately was triggered by an excursion from our retirement community to the Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley. I had read recently the Richard Rhodes book on nuclear disarmament (reviewed above), in which the account of the Reagan- Gorbachev negotiations were central, and the historical account of Reagan’s life in the Simi Valley place got me intrigued to learn more. I did a search for what I called “a balanced biography,” meaning one that was neither a hagiography nor a diatribe. Reagan was indeed a complicated man, moving from being a staunch New Deal Democrat to a fiercely conservative Republican by the time he held elective office. While I fully admired his work on disarmament, much else that he did was totally against my own personal beliefs. But, what impressed me most about the details of his life, he was a sincere and dedicated public servant. He wanted to do what he felt was best for first the state of California and subsequently for the US. While he enjoyed public life, he was not seeking glory for himself in, say, the same way our current President does. Nancy Reagan was another matter: she worked ceaselessly to protect and develop Ronnie’s reputation and credit. So I admire him for his selfless dedication, even though he sometimes pursued his ends illegally (e.g., Iran-Contra). And he was often surrounded by less than idealistic staff — their squabbles and maneuvering were extraordinary. Spitz totally delivers in telling the story of this extraordinary man in great detail.

Nicholas Stargardt. The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

This book looks at World War II from the perspective of ordinary German citizens. The outbreak of the war was very unpopular among most people, although the quick victories in Poland, France, and the early stages of the invasion of Russia gave some hope that the war might be over quickly. But it all changed, starting with serious losses on the eastern front and the beginning of bombing raids over Germany itself. And of course there was the moral issue of the campaigns against the Jews and other “undesirables.” Families with soldiers had to deal with their uncertain and often tragic fates. Stargardt draws on diaries, court records, and correspondence with soldiers to piece together a picture of what the ordinary people were going through. There was clear anti-semitism among the population, but the extent and magnitude of the extermination campaigns affected many people. It is a complicated story, and Stargardt tells it with rich detail and convincing humanity.

Benn Steil. The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

I had of course in my reading about 20th century history encountered the perhaps myth about the amazing effect of the Marshall Plan on European recovery after World War II and the effect it had on the course of the Cold War. But until I read Steil’s incisive history, I had no idea about the complexities of bringing it to fruition in the first place and the many nuances of its actual effects on Europe and the Cold War. It’s a lesson in digging into the details of a major historical event like the Marshall Plan, trying to understand its origins, its evolution, and its possible effects. It is so tangled up in the post-war history, and so many complex players were involved in its emergence, evolution, and long-term effects. I am glad that I now have a much more nuanced understanding of what it was all about. And its effects linger. In the final chapter, Steil reviews events since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Threads of Marshall Plan legacies still influence the world of Putin and the US. History is so much more complicated than stories of winners and losers. And, I fear the story of today’s events will take a long time to sort out, as we always find with history.

William Taubman. Gorbachev: His Life and Times. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.

This is a masterful biography of one of the most interesting and memorable figures of the twentieth century. From his humble beginning as a peasant, he emerged as the final head of the former Soviet Union. When he became the leader in 1985, the Communist Soviet Union was in deep trouble. He tried to oversee a transition to a more open, democratic form of socialism. But his moderate, more centrist approach alienated both the old conservatives and the newly emerging liberals. Thus his period of leadership was marked by constant turmoil, as he alienated those on both sides of his approach. But interestingly, though he struggled at home, his international reputation soared. He was celebrated wherever he traveled, including winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But his domestic troubles culminated in 1991 with an attempted, though unsuccessful coup, and his ultimate resignation in December of that year as the USSR disappeared in a wave of republic independence and the rise of the more radical Boris Yeltsin. Taubman, author also of a widely acclaimed biography of Khrushchev, tells the riveting story of Gorbachev’s rise and his troubled tenure as the final leader of the USSR, his wonderful marriage to the dynamic Raisa, and the many complicated relationships with both domestic and foreign leaders. His justly famous negotiations with Ronald Reagan re nuclear disarmament essentially ended the Cold War. His nonviolent approach to international matters led to the loss of most Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, including the reunification of Germany. Unlike most Soviet leaders, who ended their reigns in death, he has survived for 29 more years, carrying out a wide range of charitable and academic projects. Alas, he has seen the promise of democracy in Russia lost to the emergence of the authoritarian Vladimir Putin, who he initially supported but soon was disappointed in Putin’s return to an authoritarian state.

William Taubman. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

This is the leader of the Soviet Union that I grew up with. Though I overlapped with the last decade or so of Stalin’s rule, I was too young to fully appreciate what was going on with him. By the time I was following international events with some real awareness, this man was the functional head of the USSR (I say “functional head,” because in the Soviet system, there were multiple titles of people at the top, and Khrushchev was not technically the head of state). From a modest peasant beginning, Khrushchev rose rapidly through the ranks after the Russian Revolution in 1917, and by the end of the 1920s was in Stalin’s orbit and his very good graces. Throughout the 1930s, the period of Stalin’s reign of terror, Khrushchev was very close to Stalin, and though he was later repentant of his role, participated in the orgy of death and imprisonment that swept that era. He was the head of the Ukraine during World War II, and had a central role in the battles on the eastern front. Initially, when Germany and Russia were allies, he participated in the conquest of Poland and the attempts of the Soviet Union to essentially annex the eastern parts of that nation that were occupied by the Red Army. Once Germany invaded the USSR, he was involved as the political liaison to the Red Army units that were initially decimated by the Nazi armies, but finally stopped the onslaught at the horrible battle for Stalingrad. Khrushchev was in Stalingrad throughout that struggle. And of course, as the tide turned, and the Red Army swept westward all the way into Germany, Khrushchev was there. After the war he emerged as a central player in Moscow, eventually, following Stalin’s death in 1953, maneuvering into leadership. In 1956 he gave the famous denunciation of Stalin at a secret meeting in the Kremlin, though word escaped rather quickly. Indeed a translation of his speech appeared in the New York Times within a few months of its “secret” rendition. By 1957 he had solidified his position as leader of the USSR, and lasted in that position until 1964. It was a tumultuous time, as both events and his own blustery and crude personality characterized his leadership. He was able to gloat over Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the downing of a U-2 spy plane, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. But he oversaw the reckless failure of the Cuban Missile Crisis. and the split with Communist China. Throughout his regime he was plagued by a sputtering economy that his various manipulations did not end. He had bumpy relationships with foreign leaders, especially in the West. Eventually there arose serious opposition to his leadership, and he was ousted in 1964. From then until he died in 1971 he had a mostly bitter and sad retirement. Even in death he was not given the recognition that in most other nations is accorded to former leaders. But his impact on mid-century history was enormous. Taubman’s detailed and fascinating biography does justice to this most interesting historical figure.

Ian W. Toll. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.

——. The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.

These are the first two volumes of a projected trilogy on the Pacific War. Other than the attack on Pearl Harbor, my knowledge of the Pacific war was quite sketchy until I read these two volumes. There is all kinds of drama, not just in the combat itself, initially at sea but then increasingly on the Pacific islands. There were leadership conflicts on both sides, as mistakes were made, lucky encounters influenced outcomes, and over such a vast arena, logistics played a huge role. As has happened with other accounts of World War II events, vast new archives have opened up, so that the historical drama can be traced in much more interesting detail. I eagerly await the third volume.

Nina Totenberg. Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Nina Totenberg, a longtime NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the recently deceased Supreme Court Justice, had a very long friendship that began long before Ginsburg was formally in the justice system. They frequently dined together, and dealt with such friendship matters as the death of Nina’s first husband, her marriage to her second, Ruth’s loss of her husband Marty, and Ruth’s many illnesses and ultimate death. Once Ruth was a judge, initially in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and of course later in the Supreme Court, they agreed that during their many social get togethers they would not discuss pending cases, even though it was Nina’s job to cover such things for NPR. As Nina’s second husband, David, was a surgeon, he provided lots of medical advice for Ruth. He was also a superb chef, as was Ruth’s husband Marty, and they often cooked together for memorable dinner parties. It is a delightful and gripping memoir, involving all kinds of interesting friends and associates. But most of all it is an excellent view of a close friendship between two remarkable women.

Volker Ullrich. Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

This is the first volume of a recent biography of Hitler (the original was published in Germany) that in part attempts to clarify, and often debunk, a variety of myths about this notorious leader. It focuses mostly on Hitler the person, but of course along the way we encounter all the terrible things he and his minions did. This volume covers the period up to the beginning of the War. The next volume will pick up the story with the invasion of Poland.

Richard White. Who Killed Jane Stanford: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2022.

Leland Stanford Junior University (to give the place its full name) was founded in memory of the child of Leland and Jane Stanford, who died unexpectedly at the age of 8. The University opened for business in 1891, and Leland Stanford Senior, who made his fortune primarily in the railroad business. himself died in 1893. Jane Stanford was left to oversee the fate of the emerging university, and she had strong opinions, dabbled in spirituality, and meddled constantly in the university’s activities. She was widely disliked as a result. In 1905 she was poisoned to death while on a trip to Hawaii. The investigation took place both in Honolulu and San Francisco. David Star Jordan, the inaugural president of Stanford, was eager to cover up the story, claiming that Jane Stanford died of natural causes. The Honolulu investigation quite clearly supported the idea that she was  murdered, but never figured out who did it. The San Francisco police badly bungled their investigation, and got sidetracked by scandals involving the department and the Chinese community in the city. Richard White, an emeritus professor of history at Stanford, carried out a wide ranging and difficult historical investigation into the whole matter. All manner of key evidence was lost or destroyed, making the search for the murderer all the more challenging. But he persists, and writes up his search in the manner of a murder mystery, making for an engaging read. In the last chapter he comes to what he feels is a fairly compelling conclusion as to the identity of the murderer. Rather than spill the beans here, I recommend if you are interested, read this book yourself. What is quite astonishing to me, who got my graduate degrees from Stanford, is how shakey the early years of the university were. 

Steve Wick. The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 

This volume follows Shirer’s stay in Europe, from when he arrived after graduating from college and got a job with the Chicago Tribune through his later radio engagement with CBS News, where he covered the development of the Nazi regime up through the conquest of France. But his relationships with Nazi censors got so obnoxious that in 1940 he left and returned to New York. His reporting, both in print and on the air, was outstanding. He was an eyewitness to some of the most remarkable events and people of the early 20th century. The last part of the book briefly summarizes events after his departure, including his sad breakup with Edward R. Murrow. The Cuthbertson biography, reviewed above, is much more complete, but this shorter volume has interesting insights into Shirer’s critical experiences in the run-up to World War II.

Simon Winchester. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

This is the story of the destructive San Francisco earthquake of 1906, told with the aid of modern plate tectonic theory. So it is as much a history of a major tragedy as a lesson in modern geology. Winchester is a marvel of detail, and this comprehensive account not only enlightens us about history and science, but about a wide range of cultural factors that influence how we think about both. There is the sad story about the destruction of Chinatown, and the efforts of white politicians (ultimately unsuccessful) to prevent its rebuilding. There is the shift of influence from San Francisco to Los Angeles as a result of the 1906 earthquake, and although Los Angeles is not immune from earthquakes, the major San Andreas fault is far enough away from the center of the sprawling city to avoid the kind of catastrophe that hit San Francisco. And there are many surprises: one that stood out for me was that earthquakes in Alaska have measurable effects on the behavior of geysers in Yellowstone. And we learn that the damaging earthquake of 1989 in San Francisco was not the next “big one,” as it involved faults other than the San Andreas.

Simon Winchester. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins, 2021.

Land as something to be owned has a tumultuous history as Simon Winchester expertly reviews in this engaging volume. Land ownership is itself a complex topic. For example, if you own land, what are your rights. Can you do with it as you wish, or are there restrictions? Can people freely come onto your land? What ongoing costs are there, such as property taxes? How are owned regions defined, both physically and legally? What rights does the government retain? It is not obvious to all peoples that land should be owned. Native Americans in North America, the Maori in New Zealand, the aborigines in Australia, and most of Africa took the land as a common resource, available to all. So when Europeans colonized these regions, incomprehensible things happened to the locals, with often tragic results. Other conflicts include the infamous Clearances in Scotland, where rich owners cleared the lands of peasants so they could raise vast herds of sheep, and of course the conflicts over land in Israel. I learned a lot about the history of all these issues. As with the many different Winchester volumes I’ve read, the amount of scholarship he does in astounding.