Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

I am happy nowhere else and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787. Read more

Book Reviews

Tragedy and Courage in a Storm-Tossed Sea

In mid-December 1944, between Guam and the Philippines, the greatest enemy Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey’s Third Fleet encountered was not the Japanese but a monstrous typhoon—the largest storm the U.S. Read more

Book Reviews

The Civil War’s Cruelest Mission

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry was a melancholy man prior to his involvement in the Civil War. Read more

Book Reviews

The Soviets carried the heavy end of the stick

For over 60 years, the popular misconception in the West is that the U.S. and Great Britain carried the burden of World War II, while the Soviet Union played a supporting role. Read more

Book Reviews

Manipulated intelligence, faulty equipment, and inept leadership caused one of America’s worst military defeats during the Korean War.

It was dubbed “the century’s nastiest little war” by celebrated military historian S.L.A. Marshall. The conflict to which he was referring was the Korean War, a war fought, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson observed, in the worst possible location. Read more

Book Reviews

Horrific Fight on Land and Sea

Operation Iceberg, the battle of Okinawa, which lasted from April to June 1945, was the final and largest air-sea-land battle of the Pacific campaign. Read more

Book Reviews

Swashbucklers Of The China Skies

During the dark, early days of World War II, when the Imperial Japanese army, navy, and air force were running roughshod over Asia and the Pacific, it seemed that nothing could stop them. Read more

Book Reviews

T.F. Wilson’s Memoir of the Indian Mutiny

Although the bloody Sepoy insurrection of 1857 was SPARK- ed by the introduction of the new Enfield rifle, the seeds of mistrust between Indian soldiers and their British colonial masters were planted long before that. Read more

Book Reviews

Recalling the devastation of Dresden

It is highly unusual in the publishing world for two books to come out in the same year on the same topic with the same title (and even the same photo on their covers). Read more

Book Reviews

The Battle for Khartoum

He was known as Mohammed Ahmed and he was born in 1844 at Dirar, a small island near the Third Cataract of the Nile River, in the Sudanese village of Dongala. Read more

Book Reviews

Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg

Hero or scapegoat? Even with the passage of nearly 144 years since the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg was fought in the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania, controversy still shadows the role—or lack of role—played by one of General Robert E. Read more

Book Reviews

Submarine warfare is an excellent genre for gaming.

It is funny how genres come and go. A book becomes a best seller and suddenly there are a plethora of submarine games (and movies). Read more

Book Reviews

History is often stranger than fiction

By Mason B. Webb

Just when one thinks that there could not be another “untold” story about World War II, along comes a writer like Dan Kurzman with a new book about a previously untold story: the Nazis’ plan to kidnap Pope Pius XII. Read more

Book Reviews

New Tarawa book captures horror and heroism of bloody Pacific battle.

On all sides, shells detonated in bloody geysers, bullets churned the water, which looked as if it were agitated by a storm, and wounded Marines, some hideously disfigured and dying, shouted, even begged, for help.” Read more

Book Reviews

Life of a Colossus

To say that Caius Julius Caesar was one of the most influential men in world history is still something of an understatement. Read more

Book Reviews

The Mystery of the Bulge’s Lost Soldiers

He dug down to a half-rotted overshoe and tugged it free from the black soil at the bottom of the old foxhole. Read more

Book Reviews

Three fine books document the horror and heroism of the fight for Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima was one of the toughest battles of World War II, and three new books provide perhaps the definitive word on that epic, month-long struggle in February and March 1945. Read more

Book Reviews

Heroism and Horror in the First World War

Just before 7:30 on the morning of July 1, 1916, an ear-shattering explosion shook the earth near the village of Beaumont-Hamel in France. Read more

Book Reviews

Benedict Arnold’s Navy

Whenever the name of Benedict Arnold is mentioned, people immediately think in terms of the traitorous act he attempted to perpetrate against the fledging United States of America in 1780 by surrendering West Point, New York, to the British. Read more

Book Reviews

The Battle of the Atlantic

Between 1939 and 1945, over 72,000 Allied sailors, Navy airmen, and merchant seamen lost their lives in the Atlantic Ocean while attempting to deliver the food, weapons, and other supplies desperately needed by Britain and the Soviet Union in their titanic struggle against Nazi Germany. Read more