When A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks by Stewart Gordon showed up in my early reviewers program, I eagerly bid on it because the title at once conjured up for me Uluburun, the spectacular ...

When I am really impressed with a fiction writer, I often endeavor to read all or most of their works. Alas, William Faulkner was too dense and too prolific for me to succeed, but if I live long enoug...

Some months back, I relocated an antique bookcase long ago constructed from the headboard of some ancient bed to a wall in our bedroom just opposite my own pillow. It is packed full with scores of mas...

Some 250 million years ago, the great supercontinent of Pangea formed, on the eve of a great extinction that bookmarked both the close of the Permian period and the Paleozoic era; the future belonged ...

As the sesquicentennial fades, I sought to abandon binge-reading Civil War books and to move on to the postwar era of Reconstruction and Redemption. Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End...

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is a novel I probably never would have picked up had it not come to me as a gift from my daughter Sara, whom I am ever hounding to read the many books I ...

Death of a River Guide is the fourth novel that I have read by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, who ranks – along with Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami – as one of my top three living authors of ...

I may possibly have been the last Civil War enthusiast yet to read The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, a historical novel I have heard repeatedly referenced by historians, battlefield guides, reenac...

After a lifetime of reading and studying the Civil War that was even more profoundly focused by the sesquicentennial years, I have been ranging around looking for books to put an exclamation mark o…

It is a mark of how rare it is to encounter a book on the American Civil War that offers an entirely fresh perspective, adds measurably to our understanding of critical aspects of the conflict, and…

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami is the twelfth of his eighteen published works that I have read to date. Two more beckon to me from a nearby shelf in my study. Obviously I am a fan. Despite its ...

In the very first chapter of Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species, by J.A. Mills, we are introduced to the horrors of Asian bear farming and b...

I often make the mistake with short story collections of reading them end-to-end, like a novel, so that I am struck by the discontinuity of the tales – which typically have unique provenance separated...

Charles Freeman’s dense, panoramic and controversial The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason is actually three books synthesized into a single volume. One characteriz...

Reading The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914, by Barbara Tuchman, reminds us of a style of narrative history that no longer exists, a kind that is starkly and unashamedly ...

Between 1932-34, in the height of what has been dubbed the “Public Enemy Era,” two romantically-involved young sociopaths known to history as Bonnie and Clyde captured the imagination of the downtrodd...

After deeply immersing myself in Civil War studies during the past four years of the sesquicentennial – including battlefield visits and tours, a weekend seminar with noted nonagenarian historian E…

Imagine that you were brought up in a home that hosted a large extended family that was multiracial and multicultural. Your parents were white, of European ancestry, but through marriage and adopti…

I was only six years old, but I can recall it with great clarity: the principal visited our classroom—the President had been shot. My mother was crying when she picked me up from school; my teacher…

The fifty-five years since John F. Kennedy was assassinated has seen his standing rise considerably among both historians and the general public, even putting him into the top ten on some lists, wh…

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined …

Reading the “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” in its entirety rekindled a long dormant interest in the Sumerians, the ancient Mesopotamian people that my school textbooks once boldly proclaimed as inventors…

I had looked forward to reading 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline, as it came to me from a friend with whom I share a fascination of Bronze Age history and the mystery of …

On August 11, 2013, my wife and I were eagerly settling in at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center—popularly known as “The Kate”—in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, truly pumped for the upcoming sh…

In Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner sets out to rescue the legendary “Underground Railroad” from both oblivion and rev…

I came to read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, under somewhat unusual circumstances: it was pressed upon me by an elderly business client with similar histor…

Despite my own conceit that I possess a fairly broad understanding of international politics and geography, the truth is that like most Americans I know next to nothing about North Korea, a bitter …

It was something of a Greek tragedy: A man of humble origins seeking his fortune stumbles again and again, but then the advent of a great war plucks him from obscurity and he gains heroic renown as…

Arguably, Ernest Hemingway was the greatest American writer of the twentieth century. Because it is probably unfair to declare one author greater than another of their contemporaries when their sty…

The most consequential figure of what historians dub Europe’s “long nineteenth century” (1789-1914)—from the start of the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I—came to virtually define t…

If you have ever wondered, as I have, what possibly could have happened to the Virginia of the Founders’ generation that saw it fall from prominence and then emerge some several decades later hosti…

I might not have chosen to read River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War by Andrew Ward had I suspected that it would turn out to be the exhaustive study of the incident th…

It is fitting that The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan — the first book I read in 2015 — is actually the first book I purchased in the new year: on New Year’s Day, at …

An unexpected dividend to my habit of attending random author events is the occasional and remarkable encounter with a fascinating new perspective. Such was the case when I took my seat at the Odys…

A listless, uninspired, passive young man. A brooding, unsatisfied, troubled young woman. Unrequited love. Jazz music. Cats. Occasional episodes of unremarkable lovemaking. Books. Unresolved plot s…

“We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance —improved housing—a…

Some years ago, before it was shuttered to the public, my son and I took a road trip to check out the Old Newgate Prison in East Granby, CT, an abandoned copper mine that was turned into a prison i…

For some years, I have urged all those seeking a deeper understanding of our national origins to explore American Colonies, by Alan Taylor, an outstanding epic that broadly surveys not only those E…

The phrase “brother against brother” ever conjures up the American Civil War in popular memory, but that same expression could just as accurately be stamped upon our founding conflict, the American…

163 years ago tonight, an enslaved man fed Confederate officers with food pulled from the Union dead. Gettysburg still doesn't know what to do with him.

Imagine there’s a virus sweeping across the land claiming untold victims, the agent of the disease poorly understood, the population in terror of an unseen enemy that rages mercilessly through enti…