Category: History

October 10, 2013

The Gods of Gotham by Lindsay Faye *** (of 4)

The year is 1845. The city of New York has grown a little too quickly from 50,000 to half a million. The potato blight has...

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September 30, 2013

Zealot by Reza Aslan *** (of 4)

Before Jesus was the Christ (Savior), he was Jesus of Nazareth. This book does its best to set the scene in First Century Palestine. The...

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September 3, 2013

Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum ** (of 4)

World War II came to an end in large measure because the Russian Army came to the aid of the Allied Forces. Irate at having...

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August 18, 2013

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens *** (of 4)

Roughly sixty years after the event, Charles Dickens takes his hand to historical fiction, doing his best to recount the French Revolution. Simultaneously ambitious, and...

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August 5, 2013

The Days of the French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert ** (of 4)

After attempting Simon Schama’s philosophical treatise on the French Revolution, I thought it best to turn to Christopher Hibbert to get the play-by-play. What a...

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July 23, 2013

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama *** (of 4)

OK, I didn’t finish the book. After more than 300 pages of fine print and exquisitely crafted sentences I perished of exhaustion before ever learning...

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June 21, 2013

Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart ** (of 4)

While investigating her genealogy, the author, Andrea Stuart, learns she is the descendent of both a slave owner and a slave. She gets all the...

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May 14, 2013

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography ** (of 4)

In the 1940s a Bedouin searching caves above the western shore of the Dead Sea discovered urns with scrolls inside. He knew right away they...

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April 14, 2013

The President’s Club by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy *** (of 4)

An interesting perspective on U.S. history as seen through the relationships of all the Presidents since Truman to their predecessors. It is a forgiving and...

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March 17, 2013