Book Reviews

Stephen Ambrose did not set out to write Band of Brothers. He was gathering oral histories for the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans in the late 1980s when he stumbled onto a reunion of Easy Company veterans, the men of E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. What he heard over the…

In 1925, British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett walked into the Amazon rainforest with his son Jack and his son’s friend Raleigh Rimell and never came back. He had told almost no one his route. He left behind a wife who would spend the next three decades refusing to believe he was dead, a son who…

David McCullough spent years researching Harry S. Truman before writing a word of this biography. It shows. Published in 1992 and running to over eleven hundred pages, Truman covers the full arc of its subject’s life: the Missouri farm childhood, the failed haberdasher years, the rise through the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City, three…

The Splendid and the Vile opens on May 10, 1940, the day Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain and Germany began its invasion of France and Belgium. Erik Larson, the author of Devil in the White City and Dead Wake, takes readers through the next 366 days: the evacuation of Dunkirk, the fall…

In 1951, a young Black woman named Henrietta Lacks walked into Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore complaining of vaginal bleeding. Doctors found a malignant tumor on her cervix, treated her with radium, and sent her home. They also sent a small tissue sample from her tumor to a researcher named George Gey, without telling her…

In April of 1741, a British warship called HMS Wager ran aground on a desolate, storm-lashed island off the coast of Patagonia. The ship had been part of Commodore George Anson’s squadron, dispatched by the Royal Navy to harass Spanish settlements in the Pacific during the War of Austrian Succession. The Wager never reached those…

Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer’s firsthand account of the May 10, 1996 disaster on Mount Everest, in which eight climbers died in a single afternoon and evening. Krakauer had gone to the mountain as a journalist for Outside magazine, assigned originally to cover the rapid commercialization of Everest: a peak once reserved for the…