RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Chadwick, a former journalist, has achieved the effect of a living—and momentous—dialogue with history by carefully selecting quotes from dozens of participants in that fraught time and skillfully binding them together with brief commentaries. His swift, absorbing, wholly coherent narrative gives a sense of immediacy to the travails of those who thirsted for a fight, and those who groped after peace ... The quotations he arrays are rich enough to be arresting yet sufficiently brief that the reader never gets the claustrophobic feeling of being inside an anthology.
Greg Steinmetz
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... lively, succinct, altogether admirable ... [its] fair-mindedness never dims the pleasure of a speedy narrative ... Mr. Steinmetz reveals something surprising or shocking on nearly every page.
Steven Johnson
RaveThe Wall Street JournalSteven Johnson argues with verve and conviction in his thoroughly engrossing Enemy of All Mankind ... Because Enemy of All Mankind offers, among its many pleasures, a solid mystery story, it would be wrong to reveal the outcome. But it’s surprising. So, too, are the many larger themes that Mr. Johnson persuasively draws from his seaborne marauders. It is possible that readers may not be eager to learn about 17th-century metallurgy, or the coalescing of nation-states, or the rise of world-wide commerce in the era; but they will be glad they did once they encounter these matters here. All the author’s more surprising suppositions are not merely stapled onto the narrative but seem to have grown there effortlessly during the course of a spirited, suspenseful, economically told tale whose significance is manifest and whose pace never flags.
Michael Beschloss
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"[Several scenes] add sparkle and bite to Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War, his valuable and engrossing study of how our chief executives have discharged the most significant of all their duties ... [Beschloss] weaves what are in effect a dozen excellent biographies into a fluent narrative that covers two centuries of national conflict.\
