World History
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
While historians have long dug deeply into subjects relating to American and Caribbean slavery, scant attention had previously been given to the ultimate means of establishing slavery: the slave ship. A U-Pittsburgh history prof now fills that void with a work that's been roundly praised for humanizing and individualizing stories that might have gotten lost beneath a crush of soul-numbing statistics. Rediker shows that the captains of the slave ships generally treated with hideous violence not only their human "cargoes" but also their crews. Many of the seamen who manned the slave ships were tricked or kidnapped into service, cheated of their wages, then essentially dumped, with no means of support, at ports in the Western Hemisphere. But such are the ways of capitalism. Says Rediker, "The slave ship was a linchpin of a rapidly growing Atlantic system of capital and labor." Then as now, all those who benefit from diabolical exploitations of labor were -- and are -- complicit.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD and mp3 CD
The Slave Ship: A Human History ... published October 4, 2007 by Viking Adult
Seven books relating to the 50th anniversary of Sputnik
Red Moon Rising:
Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age
A polished, suspenseful recounting of the mid-50's U.S.-U.S.S.R space race.
published September 18, 2007 by Times Books
Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race
The competing Soviet and American space programs of the 1950s and '60s, seen through the eyes of the respective participants.
published September 18, 2007 by National Geographic
A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey: 1957 -- The Space Race Begins
While it covers many of the same stories in the previous two titles, this focuses more on space flight, less on international politics and competition.
published September 18, 2007 by Simon & Schuster
In the Shadow of the Moon:
A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969
The space race in its later stages and culmination with a U.S. moon landing.
published September 1, 2007 by University of Nebraska Press
'Live from Cape Canaveral':
Covering the Space Race, from Sputnik to Today
From NBC-TV reporter Jay Barbree, who's covered space shots for 50 years.
published August 28, 2007 by Collins
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
One of the space race's most fascinating persons: Nazi rocketeer, American weapons designer, space travel pitchman, and Disney TV show celebrity.
published September 25, 2007 by Knopf
America In Space: NASA's First Fifty Years
A coffee table book history of NASA, featuring 400 photos dating from the mid-1950s to the present.
published October 1, 2007 by Abrams Books
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
by Francisco Goldman
In the four decades following the 1954 CIA-sponsored overthrow of Guatemala's president, U.S.-backed military dictators oversaw the deaths of nearly 1 in 70 Guatemalan civilians. Many were tortured to death on the orders of U.S.-trained Guatemalan security officials.
Two years after a 1996 peace accord ostensibly ended Guatemala's civil wars, Msgr. Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera helped issue a 1,400-page report documenting the forces' atrocities. Two days later, he was bludgeoned to death in his garage. Guatemalan-American novelist Goldman now presents a painstakingly detailed account of the murder and the political "art" that followed, as those responsible for the killing worked to shroud the facts of the crime in deep fogs of misdirection. The story is labyrinthine and the cast large, but Goldman supplies both a concise chronology and a terse character list. They make matters more workable -- if still challenging. But since 1 in 70 American citizens would come to well over 4 million of us, maybe the effort's merited.
The Art of Political Murder ... published September 10, 2007 by Grove Press
Three Hugo Chávez biographies
Most mainstream media reporting on Chávez has been, at best, childishly simplistic. The realities of the man and phenomenon are more complex -- and more interesting. Each of these recent bios helps one see Chávez for what he is -- rather than as dishonest U.S. politicians or lazy journalists or cowardly editors might caricature him.
Hugo! The Hugo Chavez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution
Reviewers have been lavish with their praise for Bart Jones's Chávez biography, not only for its first-rate reporting, but also for its exceptionally readable style. Jones now reports for Newsday, but previously worked in Venezuela for eight years, mainly for the AP.
published September 4, 2007 by Steerforth
Hugo Chávez:
The Definitive Biography of Venezuela's Controversial President
Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka (a husband-wife team) wrote what became an international bestseller on Chávez. It's now available in an English translation.
published August 14, 2007 by Random House
Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs senior research fellow Nicholas Kozloff released a Chávez biography in 2006 that's now available in paperback. It's been lauded for its factual dependability, but some reviewers have raised questions about the author's decidedly lefty credentials.
published July 20, 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan
The Great Upheaval:
America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 by Jay Winik
The author of the wildly successful April 1865 now turns his attention to a dozen pivotal years in world history. The work is organized into 40-page (give or take) sections, alternately focused on America, France and Russia. It's a nomenclature that helps keep things moving throughout the course of this 600-page tome. Winik is particularly interested in the cross-fertilization that took place among some of the world's late 18th-century leaders and their nations -- even, he notes, without the benefit of BlackBerrys and cell phones. Sometimes the international connections are clear and strong, but at other times the author's reach exceeds his grasp. Either way, there's no denying that the period under scrutiny was filled with breathtaking change -- including the creation of the U.S. Constitution, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Empress Catherine's wars against the Ottoman Empire and Poland. And Winik's character list includes some of the most remarkable people ever to tread the world's stage.
*Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD
The Great Upheaval ... published September 11, 2007 by Harper
The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe by Greg Behrman
An Aspen Institute foreign policy fellow recalls the four-year, $13 billion ($100 billion or more in today's dollars) Marshall Plan: America at her best, in many people's estimations. The author's research and narrative sparkle, as do his well-drawn (if sometimes hagiographic) portraits of such titans of diplomacy as George Marshall, Arthur Vandenburg, and W. Averell Harriman. Concludes Behrman,
Perhaps it is worth remembering a time when ... America's foreign policy was defined, at once, by its strategic interests and the very best of its ideals; when Americans were infused with a shared sense of mission and purpose - so much so that it roused the national spirit and elevated America's own conception about what it could accomplish, what it could be. [ ¶ ] Much of what is best about America, its potential and its possibility was alive and in operation in the Marshall Plan. ... There was much reason not to take the leap. But America did, embarking upon a shared national adventure; an adventure, ultimately, of the national will, spirit and imagination - the most noble adventure.
The Most Noble Adventure ... published August 7, 2007 by Free Press
In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender
And the Battle for Postwar Asia by Ronald Spector
It turns out that America was in many instances no better at "winning the peace" in Asia after the so-called Good War than it was after its invasion of Iraq. For many years after WWII officially ended, in Asian lands from Manchuria to Java, the terrors of war continued. This the author documents through both superb research (including his mining of recently available U.S. intelligence documents) and the first-person reports of Chinese, Japanese, British and American citizens who witnessed the carnage. The NY Times called Spector's World War II-in-Asia volume Eagle Against the Sun (1984) "The best one-volume history of that complex conflict." His study of what happened to the East in the aftermath is in its own ways even more praiseworthy. Many of the postwar atrocities Spector recounts were exacerbated or directly caused by America's persistently tin ear for hearing the perspectives of those in countries over which our nation wields enormous power of many kinds. The more things change ...
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD or mp3 CD
In the Ruins of Empire ... published July 10, 2007 by Random House
The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler
And Changed the World by Kati Marton
Budapest was a magical city disproportionately endowed with geniuses during its "golden age" in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Marton (herself Hungarian) chronicles the Nazi-induced end of that charmed era, and the lives of nine historically pivotal Jewish men who fled their home city only to achieve immortality elsewhere. Four were scientists:
Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb;
polymath John von Neumann, also crucial to the creation of the H-bomb;
Leó Szilárd, who developed the idea of a nuclear chain reaction; and
Eugene Wigner, considered by some of his peers to be as brilliant as Einstein.
Filmmakers
Michael Curtiz and
Alexander Korda would create many of the English-speaking world's most acclaimed and beloved movies. Photographers
Robert Capa and
André Kertész remain two of the world's greatest.
Rounding out the nine is Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon, arguably the world's greatest anti-communist novel.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD or mp3 CD
The Great Escape ... published October 17, 2006 by Simon and Schuster
Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
by Victor Sebestyen
Marking the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution are four new books,
Failed Illusions,
Revolution in Hungary,
Journey to a Revolution,
and this by Victor Sebestyen, who was born in Budapest, but whose parents left Hungary with him when he was an infant. Though The Budapest Sun has chided Sebestyen for misreporting several geographic facts, his account has otherwise been very well received. Elements of the narrative that may surprise those unfamiliar with the 1956 uprising include the Kremlin's deeply divided and evolving opinions about how to react to it, and the provocative -- "incendiary" might be a better word -- role played by the CIA's Radio Free Europe. While RFE encouraged and even coached Hungarian freedom fighters, leading many to believe that significant American assets would soon be brought to bear on their behalvess, no such help was ever a possibility.
Twelve Days ... published October 3, 2006 by Pantheon
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
An acclaimed author and professor of humanities at Bard College had, throughout his childhood, been told of relatives -- a grand-uncle, his wife and their "four beautiful daughters" -- who'd been "killed by the Nazis." Beyond that, it seemed that no one knew what, exactly, had happened to the six. Mendelsohn sets out on what becomes a five-year, four-continent odyssey to learn how they died - and how they'd lived.
It was, to quote Mendelsohn, "to rescue my relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore to them their particularity and distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip." This is no simple, predictable narrative, but a complex, multi-layered, 500-page, epic meditation on the author's very literal voyages of discovery. His detailed sleuthing narratives are seasoned with ruminations on a variety of subjects including Jewish history and the Bible.
Mendelsohn spoke with WBUR's Tom Ashbrook on the NPR's On Point.
The Lost ... published September 19, 2006 by HarperCollins
Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
by Colin Wells
Popular understandings of Western civilization tend to slight the 1,000-year Byzantine Empire, but with Sailing from Byzantium a distinguished scholar and author (The Roman Empire) offers an erudite, superbly written corrective. Those willing to meet the author half way should find it both accessible and rewarding. Wells reminds us that the Roman Empire did not, in fact, end in 476, although its hub shifted to the east. Centered around what had been the ancient Greek colony at Byzantium, the Eastern Empire provided many continuities between the ancient and modern worlds. Wells shows that Byzantium helped nourish not only the Italian Renaissance, but also the flowering of Islamic scholarship at the time of Averroes, and the development of Christianity and Western culture in Slavic areas, including Russia.
*also avaliable, unabridged, on CD or mp3 audio
Sailing from Byzantium ... published July 25, 2006 by Delacorte Press
The Spice Route: A History by John Keay
History loves a paradox, and there can be none greater than a taste for spices being responsible for the exploration of our planet. Sovereigns pledged their prestige, and navigators risked their lives, not in the quest for gold or the thirst for power but to redirect the distribution of a few inessential and today almost irrelevant vegetable products.
So says a popular British historian who's written extensively about India and the Far East. But contrary to the book's title (and, perhaps, to popular imaginings), Keay shows that there wasn't merely one "spice route," but a multitude that developed over the three millennia in which humankind has attached great material value to "desiccated bits of vegetation" such as pepper, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon. The author also dispels another popular misconception: spices were not prized mainly for their use as meat preservatives or flavorings to mask the tastes of spoiled meats. They were, rather, sought largely for their snob appeal -- because they were expensive.
The Spice Route: A History ... published July 13, 2006 by University of California Press
Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics
Howard Zinn, interviewed by David Barsamian
This slim volume consists mainly of transcriptions of eight conversations that Zinn and Barsamian had from mid-2002 to early 2005. Those already familiar with Zinn's work will appreciate his continuing explanations of the history most of us were never taught in high school; newcomers to Zinn might prefer A People's History of the United States. Zinn and Barsamian have been speaking the same political language for decades, and the flow of ideas here is comfortable, informative, and provocative. Barsamian doesn't really push or challenge the 83-year-old Zinn much. Instead, he facilitates and catalyzes Zinn's observations on progressive and anti-imperialist politics and history from a people's-eye view. The book closes with a transcript of a commencement speech Zinn gave last year at Spelman College -- from which he'd been fired two generations ago for supporting civil rights activities.
Original Zinn ... published June 27, 2006 by Harper Collins
The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country
With a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi by Alexander Stille
A Columbia journalism prof and highly regarded author of previous books about Italy explains how former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi went about inflicting his corrupt, slimy self on Italy and the world. The short version is this: he's God's Own Salesman, fabulously rich, steeped in criminality, and he controls the vast majority of Italian TV stations. Though Italian voters bounced him this April, they did so by the narrowest of margins, and only after he'd established himself as the nation's longest-ruling PM since WWII. Thanks to his schlock TV populism, he's still popular with many Italians. Reactions to the essential story seem often to include the word "appalling." What's most disturbing here, though, is not Berlusconi, it's that he's almost certainly a harbinger of Western Democracy's increasingly degenerate future.
The Sack of Rome ... published June 22, 2006 by Penguin Press HC
Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction by Martin Gilbert
One of the UK's most successful historians (thanks mainly to Churchill biographies) uses dozens of survivor interviews to recall with horrifying vividness Kristallnacht -- the Night of Broken Glass. We see that on Nov. 9, 1938, Germans and Austrians crossed a Rubicon with a massive and lethal pogrom against their Jewish neighbors. It was, in effect, Ein Volk's enthusiastic endorsement of the Final Solution.
Six years of legalised anti-Jewish discrimination, isolating the Jews from their fellow Germans and depriving them of the rights of full citizenship, were replaced on Kristallnacht by the first manifestations of direct, nationwide ... physical violence, combined with arson, the destruction of property, the theft of property, the impoverishment of a whole community, physical assault, deportation, and mass murder. It was a brutal, hysterical, uninhibited assault on everything Jewish, on a far wide scale than hitherto, and yet only a prelude to something far larger still.
Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction ... published June 13, 2006 by HarperCollins
Charlemagne by Derek Wilson
A prolific and successful British historian and novelist looks at the man often credited with the creation of "Europe" as that term's now understood. Wilson's presentation is economical, enjoyable to read and well researched -- though scholars have caught a few missed details. And historical allegories usually result in dumb parlor games; Wilson plays them intermittently, with mixed results:
If we find it difficult to understand the mentality of Islamic suicide bombers and tend to be dismissive of all fundamentalisms, then our imaginations need to be jolted so that we can place ourselves alongside the warriors, scholars and missionaries who created and led the first western empire. They were men who believed simply, felt passionately, saw complex issues in black and white, were aggressive in word and deed and understood this world as but a shadow of a greater reality. And it was because they were the men they were -- heroes in every sense of the word--that they turned the tide of events, took hold of a culture that seemed doomed to extermination by superior forces and forged the civilization of which we are the heirs.
Charlemagne ... published June 6, 2006 by Doubleday
Among the Dead Cities by A. C. Grayling
In World War II the Allies targeted civilian areas of German and Japanese cities with massive bombing raids in which high explosive and incendiary bombs (and, of course, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs) were dropped with horrific effect. It's estimated that 800,000 civilians died as a result. A British philosopher asks whether these were crimes against humanity or "justified by the necessities of war."
Grayling offers a concise history of WWII area bombing and reconstructs the circumstances that led many on the Allied side believe it was a reasonable thing to do. Though in the end he reaches the expected conclusions that the bombing was reprehensible and unjustified, the process of getting there is thought provoking and timely. Civilian oversight of military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq has been poor at best, and Grayling's book focuses the reader's mind on the need to manage military operations (particularly those involving "our" troops) rationally. Whether that's inherently impossible is, of course, another question.
Among the Dead Cities ... published March 7, 2006 by Walker & Company
Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale
A University of London history prof gives "Ivan" -- the ordinary Red Army soldier of WWII -- overdue credit for beating staggering odds and losses and halting Hitler on the Eastern Front. Thirty million Soviet men and women served; over 8 million died -- more than 20 times the number of American soldiers who died in the war. Merridale uses newly opened documents and hundreds of interviews to reveal Ivan's day-to-day life.
While many Red Army soldiers are seen to be heroic, Stalin is their habitual betrayer, his purges decimating their officer corps, his policies intentionally subjecting the troops to chronic and severe supply shortages. Among his functionaries were the "political officers" who accompanied every unit, hectoring the soldiers with propaganda and shooting those who objected to the suicidal tactics that produced some of the most appalling casualty rates in history. Ivan does not go blameless, though; the vengeance visited on Berlin after the war is bestial and relentless. [A Woman in Berlin is a must-read regarding that aspect of the war.]
Ivan's War ... published January 24, 2006 by Metropolitan Books
The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky
An anthropologist with the Scott Polar Research Institute who's been living and traveling among reindeer herders in northern Siberia intermittently since 1988 offers a glimpse of peoples at home in a world where temperatures can fall to 96 degrees below zero. Despite the fact that those peoples number only in ten tens of thousands, their nomadic range is vast: roughly a third of Russia. Says Vitebsky,
My quest to enter the inner world of the Eveny could not be fulfilled by ... direct, crude questions, but only by sharing their daily work, witnessing their life stories, and reflecting on their experiences of spirits and dreams. The life of another people is a mystery one can never plumb to the full; but my reward for living with the Eveny has been some wonderful friendships, and a glimpse into the enduring relationship between a community of humans and a species put on earth to nourish them with its flesh, insulate them with its fur, and exalt them with its soul.
The Reindeer People ... published December 8, 2005 by Houghton Mifflin
After the Victorians by A. N. Wilson
A prolific British novelist, biographer and historian (author of 2003's highly acclaimed The Victorians) looks at a British Empire in decline during (roughly) the half-century from the death of Queen Victoria to the coronation of Elizabeth II. While Wilson's been criticized for getting the occasional fact wrong and reaching a few curious conclusions, he atones for such pardonable sins with lively, sometimes bawdy storytelling. For example, shortly after ruminating on the prevalence of circumcision in early 20th-century England, and just prior to exploring the Titanic disaster in the context of pre-war Britain, Wilson informs us that
George V ... was socially shy and awkward. Like Queen Victoria, and like both his sons Edward VIII and George VI, he had uncontrollable temper tantrums. "Stupid dog!" he unconvincingly exclaimed when he himself had farted, kicking out at the animal which, being unfortunately made of china, smashed to smithereens.
It's nice to see a man enjoying his work as much as Wilson evidently is; his delight tends to be infectious.
After the Victorians ... first published October 13, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich
There aren't many books that "everyone in family" can appreciate on a given work's own merits, but this one qualifies. In 1935, Viennese art historian E. H. Gombrich (author of the The Story of Art, which has sold more than 4 million copies) spent six weeks writing a world history aimed at what we'd now call middle school students. The result has been translated into 18 languages and has long been a favorite around the world. Its first English translation not only shows why, but also has led to a major resurgence in interest in others of Gombrich's works. Although it's aimed directly at kids, A Little History does not condescend, and there's an abundance of worthwhile and consequential information that most adults have either long forgotten or never knew. But what's really made the book such a beloved classic is Gombrich's charm as a storyteller, which makes this dandy little history an unusual and rewarding pleasure.
*Also available on mp3 CD
A Little History of the World ... published October 13, 2005 by Yale University Press
Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the
Defeat of the Moors by James Reston, Jr.
The author of a dozen previous books; contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, et. al.; and scriptwriter for three Frontline documentaries now focuses on late 15th-century Spain, where many key strands of human history were woven together. He uses as focal points the doings of Queen Isabella, Christopher Columbus, and Torquemada; the pivotal year of 1492 is central to the work. Says Reston,
It has been suggested that the three most important years in American history are 1492, 1776, and 1865. Of these, 1492 goes far beyond American history. It is pivotal as well in Spanish history, in Jewish and Arab history, in World and Church history. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine another single year in the past millennium when so many significant strands of history came together and so changed the world in one swoop: the completion of the 500-year movement to conquer the Moors, the end of the 800-year reign of the glorious culture of Islamic Spain, the consolidation of the modern Spanish state, the sinister explosion of the Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish renaissance in art and literature, the expulsion of the Jews, the discovery of the New World, and the subsequent division of the world between Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence.
Dogs of God ... first published October 11, 2005 by Doubleday
Postwar by Tony Judt
While professional scholars specializing in recent European history will no doubt have their quibbles with Tony Judt's grand panorama of Europe since World War II, I have nothing but admiration for every aspect of this work. It covers an incredibly tumultuous six decades with supreme lucidity and thoroughness, and the author's uncluttered but elegantly sculpted prose makes it all highly accessible to the general reader.
Judt explores four major postwar-European themes: (1) the reduction of the Continental powers' scope through the loss of their empires; (2) the withering away of grand ideologies (such as Marxism); (3) the rise of a "European model" (as opposed to "the American way of life"), in which governments act to blunt many of capitalism's jagged edges; and (4) the "serially homogenous Europe" in which, until recently, national amnesia was a common phenomenon and traditional conflicts had been substantially but artificially and temporarily quieted in the wake of Hitler's and Stalin's machinations.
Postwar ... first published October 6, 2005 by The Penguin Press HC
Beyond Glory by David Margolick
Regardless of how one regards boxing (I'd like to see it outlawed), there's no denying the fact that in the 20th century it regularly provided vital focal points for some of humankind's most profound social and political struggles. So it was with the rivalry and two prize fights (in 1936 and '38) between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling: pugilists who came to symbolize for many the differences between America and Nazi Germany.
Margolick, a longtime contributing editor to Vanity Fair, breathes new life into a story that captivated the West nearly seven decades ago, not only using it as a vehicle to trace the inexorable march toward World War II, but also as a complex and intensely compelling story in its own right. Particularly fascinating (and in many ways troubling) is Schmeling, who managed the neat trick of thrilling the Nazis with his 1936 triumph while employing both a Jewish manager and a Jewish promoter for the New York bouts. And, Margolick concludes, "Max Schmeling honored Joe Louis when he lived, and once Louis died, Schmeling embraced him even more tenaciously, until he, too, passed on. 'I didn't only like him,' he once said. 'I loved him.' "
Beyond Glory ... first published September 27, 2005 by Knopf
A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous
The author, a journalist before and after World War II, lived in Berlin and kept a diary from April 20 to June 22, 1945 documenting the fall of the Nazi regime and subsequent occupation of the city by Russian troops. The book was first published in 1954 in an English translation but quickly sank into obscurity. Now re-issued in a new translation, it should take its place in any basic canon of World War II chronicles.
While the journal offers a wealth of ugly detail that vividly evokes day-to-day life in a conquered city, the dominant reality of the book is rape. It is estimated that 100,000 women were raped in Berlin shortly after the war, and perhaps 2 million throughout Germany. The author chronicles her own rapes and those of many other women, young and old, in her neighborhood. By focusing on daily life in one neighborhood, the diaries take the reader past the horrific but abstract rape statistics to a more concrete and visceral experience that demands a significant re-thinking of the shape and meaning of World War II -- and war in general.
A Woman in Berlin ... new English translation July 14, 2005 by Metropolitan Books
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