History book reviews: narrative and academic histories spanning ancient civilizations to modern events.
In August 1914, Europe went to war in ways its leaders had not planned for, against opponents they had not fully calculated, with consequences none of them foresaw. Barbara Tuchman’s account of the first thirty days of World War I — the mobilizations, the miscalculations, the early battles along the Belgian and French frontiers —…
Niall Ferguson’s Empire is a revisionist account of the British Empire that takes seriously a question most historians have been reluctant to ask directly: on balance, was the British Empire a force for good or ill in the world? Ferguson’s answer — cautious, conditional, and certain to irritate — is that the Empire spread institutions…
The Looming Tower is an account of how the United States failed to prevent the September 11 attacks — not because intelligence was absent, but because the institutions responsible for acting on it were competing rather than cooperating. Lawrence Wright reconstructs the decade-long rise of al-Qaeda through meticulous reporting, following FBI counterterrorism agent John O’Neill,…
Salt is one of those substances so ordinary we no longer see it — the white crystals on every table, the invisible ingredient in almost every food. Mark Kurlansky’s project in this book is to make it visible again: to trace the way salt shaped human history from the earliest settlements through the modern industrial…
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair that drew 27 million visitors and introduced the United States to, among other things, the Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack, and a vision of what a city could become. Erik Larson tells two stories in parallel: the construction of the fair, which was an engineering…
