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Recent Reviews
Stefanos Geroulanos
Positive The Wall Street Journal Geroulanos surveys many of the fantasies and self-serving myths that have been used to fill in the dangerously wide-open blank space between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing ... The strength of Mr. Geroulanos’s book lies in its breadth. It ranges easily from the pseudoscience of Freud and Jung (for both of whom idiosyncratic notions of prehistory were important) to Nazi obsessions with origins.
Mary Beard
Rave The Wall Street Journal Has no chronological narrative. It looks at the rulers of Rome through the prism of 10 separate themes, from “power dining” to imperial travel, as Ms. Beard returns to subjects she has treated throughout her career (imperial portraiture, Roman triumphs, deification). Each of the themes offers a vivid way to re-examine what we know, and don’t, about life at the top ... For all its detail and diverse interests, the book’s unifying argument might be that it is very hard to grasp the truth of what the emperors were actually like ... Beard punctuates her erudite but easy prose with striking turns of phrase and arresting observations ... A masterly group portrait.
Vaclav Smil
Positive The Wall Street Journal [Smil\'s] painstaking research on subjects too technical (or mundane) for most professional historians makes him an indispensable resource for understanding how the modern world came into being ... How the World Really Works represents the highly readable distillation of this lifetime of scholarship ... Reading Mr. Smil is a bit like watching a grumpy uncle put the naive cousins in their place at a proverbial Thanksgiving squabble ... there is something in How the World Really Works for everyone to hate. At the same time, Mr. Smil disavows both prediction and prescription, instead aiming to understand how we got here (to a time when half of the world enjoys at least a decent standard of living), because he believes that to be a prerequisite for clear and honest thinking about how to get where we want to go (to a decent standard of living to everyone in a sustainable manner) ... cuts through the excesses of alarmism and denialism. Critics will argue that this leads Mr. Smil to underestimate the chances of technological breakthroughs and environmental catastrophe alike. Both are possible.
Vidya Krishnan
Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... as Ms. Krishnan vividly reminds us, TB is not a disease of the past ... the only history to be found consists of anecdotes from the 19th century. It is unfortunate that the deeper history of tuberculosis does not seem to interest Ms. Krishnan ... What makes Ms. Krishnan’s book worth the price of admission is the tableau she paints of the current plague. She writes with authority about the current state of TB globally, especially in her native India, which is the epicenter of the disease today. A 20-year veteran of medical journalism, Ms. Krishnan is a powerful storyteller, and her accounts of frustration, suffering, grief and resilience are moving ... Ms. Krishnan’s book is self-consciously a work of activism. She does not believe in intellectual property rights; pharmaceutical companies are a source of exploitation, not innovation. These parts of the book cannot be accused of nuance.
Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe tr. Caroline Waight
Rave The Wall Street Journal Krause and Trappe provide a thrilling overview of what the archaeogenetics revolution has taught us about European population history ... Krause and Trappe capture the excitement of this young field. As is inevitable on the bleeding edge of science, some of their claims—for instance, regarding the New World origins of syphilis—already look shaky in the light of new findings. And as they note, the findings of archaeogenetics can be used or abused for a variety of purposes, from medicine to politics. Racists and ethnonationalists ought to find nothing but disappointment in these discoveries. European population history is a story of change—of dynamism, upheaval, mixture, migration, adaptation and, of course, suffering. It is a history we are starting to decode as never before.