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Recent Reviews
Howard Bryant
Rave Bookreporter What Howard Bryant is doing here in his biography of Rickey Henderson is to assert the primacy of the box score over the sportswriter’s craft. He counterpoints his review of Henderson’s career with quotes from the sportswriters of the day ... intensely and satisfyingly entertaining
Candice Millard
Rave Bookreporter Millard is an outstanding narrative historian, with the gift of breathing new life into long-forgotten stories, but what she does best is communicate to the reader the horrid details of suffering. There is a passage in which Burton’s companion and rival, John Hanning Speke, is attacked by an avalanche of beetles, one of which burrows into his ear and is poised to set off on an expedition for his brain. Speke was forced to try to dig the creature out with a knife, and Millard takes almost clinical care in exploring the depths of his misery ... It may not be entirely seemly for the reader to take pleasure in the suffering of Burton and Speke, but the allure of traveling with Candice Millard should not be missed.
Phil Keith
Rave Bookreporter Despite its clunky, unfortunate title, To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth is a stellar retelling of Civil War naval history, focusing not on the blockade or the showier Monitor-Virginia duel, but on the lonely shadow war fought by the Alabama on American shipping ... Keith and Clavin have righted a great slight and thrown the efforts of the two great ships and their crew into the spotlight. This is a masterwork of historical recovery and will be a proud addition to anyone’s Civil War library.
Mark Billingham
Rave Bookreporter Author Mark Billingham gets almost everything right here—the character of Alice, who is by turns fascinating, pitiful and manipulative; the atmosphere of the ward and its grimness; the unctuous posturing of the staff; and the effects of the various drugs. Overall, the book is an effective hybrid—an absorbing character study doubling as a travelogue through a place that many of us find intimidating ... an uncommonly well-done book that lifts the lid off a dark corner of the world that we don’t like to think about. It also introduces us to a character who, despite all her inner turmoil and delusional behavior, we end up rooting for.
Nathaniel Philbrick
Positive Bookreporter There is a lot of history in the book; Philbrick does an outstanding job telling the story of Washington’s first inauguration in New York, detailing the triumphal journey through Philadelphia and Trenton, and the political calculation of the brown suit (crafted in America) that he wore to the ceremony ... All of that is coupled with a good bit of interesting historical travel guidance ... It is not necessarily bad criticism to point out that if you are someone who would roll your eyes about Philbrick stopping the narrative to tell a (hilarious) story about his dog, you are going to have an issue. But I think it is unfair criticism to say that this sort of thing is wrong, or even self-indulgent. Even if you were to say it is self-indulgent (and you might not be wrong), I mean, come on. This is Nathaniel Philbrick we’re talking about. If you or I had put together a body of historical literature to rival his, we might be self-indulgent, too ... However, the focus of the book, where it should rightly be, is on George Washington ... memorable and vital.
Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Positive Bookreporter Because this area of history is so often neglected, it’s extremely helpful that the authors pause in telling Boone’s story to provide the missing perspective ... This is especially helpful in terms of the focus placed on the tribes that were ultimately displaced and dispossessed by Boone and the settlers who came after him. Blood and Treasure is clear about the human cost of American expansion beyond the Appalachians, portraying Boone not so much as a heroic pioneer but as one of many participants in what turned out to be an unequal struggle ... Drury and Clavin, to their credit, aren’t in the mythmaking business and present Daniel Boone as a player in a larger theater rather than a protean force of nature. Blood and Treasure highlights an oft-forgotten stage of American history and does it—and its subject—justice.
Ed Ruggero
Mixed Bookreporter One of several recent historical mysteries that focus on the era of the Second World War ... initially comes on like gangbusters, with a promising cold open ... All the pieces are there for author Ed Ruggero to put them together, but he doesn’t quite achieve that ... The difficulty with the just-the-facts approach results in a book that is overly talky and not in any way evocative. Comes the War covers the themes of 1944 London — privation, rationing, dread of the unknowns regarding the coming invasion of Fortress Europe — without ever giving the reader a sense of the time and place ... a perfectly adequate and satisfying police procedural, and if you’re not asking for much more than that, you won’t be disappointed. But there is so much promise in this particular historical setting, and so many opportunities for the stolid American cop to run into characters who are interesting, or at least eccentric. All of the elements are there; they are just not delivered in the right way.
Elliot Ackerman and James Admiral Stavridis
Mixed Bookreporter You can’t fault the book too much on a strategic level. The war centers just where you think it might ... The novel starts out gratifyingly...However, from that point on, the story of the conflict becomes subsumed into two parallel subtexts ... It’s because of the concern about the fragility of the command-and-control technology that 2034 may be labeled a \'technothriller,\' but that’s misleading. The attraction of the technothriller is that readers walk away feeling as though they have learned something...Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis don’t take the time to explain why the Chinese are able to black out naval communications or how it’s done ... It is always pointless --- and borderline ungrateful --- to wish that a book would be bigger than it is, to have a wider scope, to tell a different story. 2034 accomplishes what it seeks out to do. It sets up a serious strategic problem, explores how both sides attempt to resolve the conflict, raises important issues about how the battle could be fought and what the results could be, and tells its story from a high-level perspective. However, that perspective is as remote and bloodless as Lee on his horse at Gettysburg. The real action, the life-and-death struggle, is out there at the point of the spear. 2034 doesn’t find its way there.
Rave Book Reporter The history of events can and does make for entertaining reading, especially when there is a dispute about what the events in question actually were. Chicago\'s Great Fire is on top of this, localizing the start of the fire in the O’Leary barn, but absolving Mrs. O’Leary and her cow of any responsibility for setting it ... But the history of ideas is often more fascinating, and it is here where Smith finds his best expression ... Chicago\'s Great Fire is an exemplary historical retelling of an event that still looms large in the American imagination, and an exploration of how the response to it was shaped by the ideas and ideals of the time. It manages the difficult balance between these two modes expertly, with an eye towards both the interesting anecdotal narrative and the greater historical significance.
Carl Smith
Rave Book Reporter The history of events can and does make for entertaining reading, especially when there is a dispute about what the events in question actually were. Chicago\'s Great Fire is on top of this, localizing the start of the fire in the O’Leary barn, but absolving Mrs. O’Leary and her cow of any responsibility for setting it ... But the history of ideas is often more fascinating, and it is here where Smith finds his best expression ... Chicago\'s Great Fire is an exemplary historical retelling of an event that still looms large in the American imagination, and an exploration of how the response to it was shaped by the ideas and ideals of the time. It manages the difficult balance between these two modes expertly, with an eye towards both the interesting anecdotal narrative and the greater historical significance.
Robert Harris
Mixed Bookreporter ... the inherent challenge in simultaneously telling the V2 story from both the British and German sides is that the author must get the reader to have at least a little sympathy for the German character --- and if you humanize the German character, so must you humanize the British character. Unfortunately, this is the part of the book that doesn’t work quite as well. The WAAF analyst is bland, competent and long-suffering in the classic stiff-upper-lip style. The German engineer is earnest, conflicted and grieving a recent loss, and thoroughly disgusted with the war and its suffering. But you can’t let the German character off the hook for the outrages of the Nazi regime, and Harris balances what sympathy the reader might have for the engineer with his complicity with the slave labor used to build the V2 bases ... What I think Harris might be doing here, in pitting these two unmemorable characters against each other, and having them attack each other at long distance by proxy, is saying something about the impersonal nature of modern war ... There is a lot to like about V2. The history is presented accurately and fairly, the emotions of the characters are on point, and the technical details are interesting but don’t swat the reader over the head the way that modern technothrillers tend to do. But the best historical novels have the characters drive the history; here, though, it is the history that drives the characters. V2 is more than worth it for the history --- particularly the hidden history of the WAAF --- but Harris can’t bring the characters up to that high standard.
Doug J. Swanson
Rave Bookreporter This is the history that isn’t talked about, the history that hides in plain sight, the history that doesn’t advance the narrative. But the history is still there, and ignoring it --- ignoring the, frankly, racist acts of both the Rangers and the Texans they protect --- does no one a service ... So for Texans like me, who are the heirs of the frontier and benefit from the actions of the Rangers of the past, the question is: How do we use this knowledge that the Rangers have been complicit in deplorable acts? One good place to start is reading Cult of Glory and understanding how the frontier world of the Rangers still impacts ours.
Emily Nemens
Positive Bookreporter What Nemens does in The Cactus League --- and brilliantly so --- is to describe the quietly desperate lives of the various characters and invite the reader to find not only empathy with them, but communion as well. What the characters have in common is a sort of low-frequency anguish, like background static from a far-off baseball broadcast, ever-present but insistent. Nemens takes this anguish and illuminates it, bringing a degree of grace to their struggles. And the superstar left fielder around whom all of the other characters rotate is not immune to that himself, as we learn ... not what you would call a hopeful book, but it manages to be all the better for it.
Burt Solomon
Rave Bookreporter ... a thoroughly delightful read ... This is a very old-fashioned sort of murder mystery, where most everyone is a suspect and there are the standard red herrings and false leads ... an abiding love for turn-of-the-century America and a profound interest in how the country was changing and growing at that time ... Primarily, though, The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt is about delighting its audience, and Solomon does a thorough job of doing just that. He breathes life not only into the character of John Hay, but also to a host of other luminaries ranging from Henry Adams to Nellie Bly. Hay is nobody’s idea of a great detective, but he works his way through the labyrinthine plot with verve and purpose. Anyone with any kind of interest in the period and the characters will be glad to immerse themselves in the narrative, and the more casual mystery reader will appreciate the overall sense of suspense and gratification at the resolution.
Maurice Isserman
Positive Bookreporter The best parts of The Winter Army are the chapters about the preparation for war, which sounds odd but isn’t in this context.... Isserman’s history of the division balances nicely between the administrative details of fielding the division, and the hardships and losses that the division faced in battle --- some of them, in his opinion, unnecessary. The Winter Army is a sober, clear-eyed view of what it takes to train, equip and mount a fighting force, and the human cost borne by those brave men in the remote mountains of Italy who always pushed forward ... valuable and telling.
Joe Posnanski
Mixed Bookreporter While the book itself is perfectly, if narrowly, delightful, I hope that its particular genre doesn’t catch on ... a biography, after a fashion, although a sketchy one ... I don’t think you can question the general thesis, but I seriously doubt that Houdini’s legacy is quite as pervasive as Posnanski makes it out to be. He states, in one passage, that you simply can’t be ambivalent about Houdini. I am entirely pleased to be ambivalent about him ... does two things very effectively. First, it lets Posnanski tell Houdini stories, which usually turn out to be interesting or fun ... Posnanski takes a great deal of glee in relating the best stories --- and debunking the worst ones --- and his excitement is infectious. Secondly, he lets his interview subjects dunk on Houdini from time to time --- pointing out that he wasn’t a great card or technical magician ... As for the rest of the book, while it’s technically fine, it doesn’t quite capture the imagination ... If you’re even vaguely interested in Houdini, Posnanski’s book is a great deal of fun and does a lot to separate the myths from the facts. But if you’re primarily interested in a biography qua biography, the long divergent stretches where the author talks to Houdini obsessives will either strike you as engaging, in which case you’re fine, or annoying bordering on grating, in which case you’re probably in the market for a different Houdini biography.
Kevin Cook
Mixed Bookreporter After a brief rundown of the storied histories of both clubs, Cook keeps the focus on the game --- providing an out-by-out, if not a pitch-by-pitch, rundown of each inning. Generally speaking, there is a word for such a thing: tiresome. Almost nobody, not even the most hardened fan, wants to read about every single out of every single game. Even with an eventful game like this one, the narrative lags now and then ... If there’s one thing I could have done without in Ten Innings at Wrigley, it’s the consistent reliance on, and repetition of, every single solitary cliché known to the baseball world ... likely will have zero appeal outside the devoted baseball fan base, and that’s a disappointment. Cook has taken a story that could have been one of those online oral histories you see occasionally and turns it into a feast for the ears of any true fan of the Great Game and the way it was played in the ’70s. But the book isn’t quite enough of an outlier to be truly remarkable.
Cara Robertson
Positive Bookreporter \"Robertson is an attorney, and she weaves the dead transcripts into new life, producing a tale nearly as riveting today as it must have been then ... But most of what Robertson captures is familiar to the contemporary reader—the surprise exhibits, the chatty witnesses, the struggles over admissible and inadmissible evidence ... [The case remains unproven], and will remain so, despite the excellence of Robertson’s legal, analytical and narrative skills.\
Richard Brookhiser
Positive BookReporter Marshall’s life, up until he was elevated to the Court, is lively and interesting, and author Richard Brookhiser does a masterful job of showing the forces that shaped his philosophy ... will please legal scholars more than casual readers, but even the latter will find much to enjoy and savor here.
Bernard Cornwell
Positive Bookreporter \"In War of the Wolf, Uhtred is essentially playing diplomat... But once the time for diplomacy ends, and the time for revenge arrives, Uhtred is back where he belongs, in the shield-wall, and telling the story of fame and heartbreak, blood and tears, sword against sword. Whether you believe it all or not is up to you; the good news is that Cornwell, once again, makes it easy to do so.\