Book Reviews

Summary On December 17, 1903, on a windswept beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew a powered aircraft for twelve seconds and covered 120 feet. It was the first time in human history that a heavier-than-air machine had achieved controlled, powered flight. He and his brother Wilbur had achieved what the Smithsonian Institution…

Summary Howard Zinn opens A People’s History of the United States with Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean and his first encounter with the Arawak people, whom he described in his journal as gentle, intelligent, and potential Christians and then enslaved for gold extraction. The Arawak had, as Zinn quotes, no iron tools and no desire…

Summary John Adams has always been the underrated founder. Washington was the indispensable man, Jefferson the poet of liberty, Hamilton the financial genius. Adams was the vice president who called his office the most insignificant invented by man or his imagination, the president who lost to Jefferson after one term, the founder whose son became…

Summary On November 20, 1820, a sperm whale attacked and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the nearest land. Twenty men were left alive in three small whaleboats with enough provisions for perhaps sixty days. The nearest inhabited land was the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles to…

Summary The year 1776 nearly ended the American Revolution before it had properly begun. George Washington’s Continental Army was routed on Long Island in August, forced out of New York, and driven across New Jersey in a retreat that looked, from the British perspective, like the beginning of the end. The army was melting away…

Summary For centuries, Genghis Khan has been the shorthand for conquest and destruction: the warlord who devastated Central Asia, killed millions, and left nothing behind but rubble and terror. Jack Weatherford spent years living among the Mongolian nomads and studying the recently declassified Mongolian national epic, the Secret History of the Mongols, and arrived at…

Summary For forty years in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Comanche Indians of the southern plains were the most powerful military force in North America. They stopped Spanish expansion cold, devastated Apache and Navajo populations, and held the Texas frontier at bay long after the United States Army had defeated every other major…

Summary In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the least credentialed man seeking the Republican presidential nomination. William H. Seward was the party’s intellectual leader and presumptive nominee. Salmon P. Chase had been a senator and governor of Ohio. Edward Bates was a former congressman and respected elder statesman. All three considered Lincoln a provincial lawyer whose…