Category: History

February 3, 2013

Code Name Verity *** (of 4) by Elizabeth Wein

This is the tale of a irrepressible friendship between two women doing very unusual jobs. It is World War II and England is barely holding its own...

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December 18, 2012

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom ** (of 4)

In the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell, working for a surly King Henry, is in battle with the Roman Catholic church. The Pope’s monasteries have dominated rural life for...

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November 15, 2012

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak *** (of 5)

Jozef Ondrej is taken by his father as an infant, after his mother dies, to the mountains of central Europe on the eve of the...

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October 28, 2012

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro **** (of 4)

Third in Caro’s serial biography of Lyndon Johnson, this massive volume covers Johnson’s decade in the Senate. For most of the 1950s LBJ ran the...

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August 13, 2012

1493 by Charles Mann *** (of 4)

Prior to Columbus’s blundering into the Caribbean, there was negligible interchange of plants, animals, or humans between continents. Shortly thereafter the onset of large-scale globalization...

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June 17, 2012

Churchill by Paul Johnson ** (of 4)

An interesting approach to a biography of the man who saved western civilization from Hitler. Churchill wrote more than 10 million words in his lifetime,...

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May 21, 2012

Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens **** (of 4)

A memoir of Hitchen’s 60 years on earth most of it he spent as an irrascible, cantankerous, and largely contrarian thinker, writer, and agitator. As...

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May 15, 2012

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson *** (of 4)

William E. Dodd, an unassuming, dysthymic, history professor at the University of Chicago finds himself America’s ambassador to Berlin in 1933. President Roosevelt is battling...

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April 24, 2012

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka **** (of 4)

An elegy for the Japanese women who arrived in California in the early part of the twentieth century as mail-order brides to join lonely Japanese laborers. ...

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April 1, 2012