Category: History

December 18, 2016

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard *** (of 4)

The United States was on rocky footing in the immediate decades following the civil war with the North wanting revenge and the south not yet...

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December 1, 2016

American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin *** (of 4)

Patty Hearst was the daughter of one of the wealthiest and most influential media men in American history (think Fox News) when she was kidnapped...

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October 20, 2016

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

This recounting of America’s dust bowl is a vivid, filthy painting of an American environmental disaster brought about by greed, hubris, and ignorance. After demolishing...

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September 28, 2016

The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff ** (of 4)

It is the middle of the fifth century, though you would have to know that on your own, as there is no indication in the...

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September 25, 2016

Children of the Arbat *** (of 4) by Anatoli Rybakov

The Arbat is a Moscow neighborhood; its children are the teens and twenty-somethings caught up in Stalin’s increasingly repressive communism of the 1930s. These youth...

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August 1, 2016

The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon *** (of 5)

In 1908 a Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch knocked on the door of Chicago’s police chief. After handing the Chief Shippy a letter (we never learn...

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May 29, 2016

The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan **** (of 5)

The immortal Irishman is Robert Meagher, surely the most famous and interesting person I’ve never heard of. Meagher (pronounced Mar) was an incomparably gifted nineteenth...

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May 1, 2016

The Incarnations by Susan Barker *** (of 4)

China, despite its rocket launch into modernity, is still a country of five thousand years of history. As Americans, a people that at best can only recall...

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April 8, 2016