Book Reviews

Book Reviews

H. W. Brands’ ‘American Patriarch’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Perfectly timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of American independence, this biography offers a comprehensive, meticulously researched portrait of the man who embodies the very concept of what it is to be American—Founding Father and first president George Washington. Read more

Liberators of the Ninth Air Force endure heavy anti-aircraft fire during a costly low-level raid against the Romanian oil field at Ploesti, May 1944.

Book Reviews

Jan Cress Dondi’s ‘The Navigator’s Letter’

By Kevin Seabrooke

On “Black Sunday,” (August 1, 1943) 178 B-24 Liberators flew from Benghazi, Libya, on a daring daylight raid on Germany’s oil refineries in Ploiești, Romania—losing 53 planes, with 660 airmen killed or captured. Read more

Book Reviews

Tom Clavin’s ‘Vengeance’

By Kevin Seabrooke

This book from journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin has been released to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25–26, 1876). Read more

Prisoners being processed upon arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, May 1944, where a million Jews, including 70,000 from Greece, were gassed.

Book Reviews

Luke Berryman’s ‘Resisting Nazism’

By Kevin Seabrooke

The founder of The Ninth Candle, a Chicago-based organization focused on Holocaust education and fighting antisemitism, Berryman was inspired to collect these stories of resistance after researching the life of his grandfather Sam Mindel. Read more

Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force fly through thick enemy flak during bombing runs against the oil refinery complex at Ploesti, Romania. These bombers executed one of the most hazardous missions of World War II, and accurate weather information decrypted from German sources facilitated such air operations.

Book Reviews

Thomas McKelvey Cleaver’s ‘Bloody Skies’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Though the “Mighty Eighth” based in England earned the most headlines, the U.S.A.A.F.’s Fifteenth based in Italy played no less important—and every bit as dangerous—a role in bombing targets in Nazi Germany, France and Eastern Europe. Read more

This artist’s impression of the sinking of Indianapolis shows the warship engulfed in flames in the distance with Japanese submarine I-58 on the surface in the foreground. The cruiser sank within minutes of being struck by a torpedo.

Book Reviews

Sara Vladic’s ‘The Dangerous Shore’

By Kevin Seabrooke

While the fighting raged in Europe and the Pacific during WWII, those on the homefront had to deal with all manner of threats—both imagined and real, maintaining constant vigilance in the hunt for spies and saboteurs, both homegrown and those landed on America’s shores by German submarines. Read more

Book Reviews

Evelyn Iritani’s ‘Safe Passage’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Long and difficult, beset by bureaucracy, xenophobia and suspicion, the process of trading Allied civilians who had become trapped in Axis countries with the outbreak of world war for Axis civilians who had likewise become trapped in the United States was an exhausting process for American diplomat James Hugh Keeley Jr., Read more

Carlson's Raiders pull away from a fast transport (APD) during training for the Makin Raid in early 1942. This exercise was to gain proficiency in the use of small rubber boats. However, heavy seas swamped several of the craft during the run-in from the submarines to the beach at Makin.

Book Reviews

Stephen R. Platt’s ‘The Raider’

By Kevin Seabrooke

The enigmatic Colonel Evans Fordyce Carlson, a “racially progressive, bleeding-heart communist sympathizer,” returned to China in 1937 for almost two years to observe the Chinese Communist Party’s 8th Route Army, led by Mao Tse-Tung, and spent nearly a year with guerrillas behind Japanese lines. Read more

Book Reviews

Jasper Craven’s ‘God Forgives, Brothers Don’t’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Craven first delved into this topic with an investigative article featured in the May/June 2022 issue of Mother Jones with the headline, “Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies.’” Read more

An RAF Westland Lysander Mark I flies over the Beirut waterfront shortly after the city fell to the British in July 1941.

Book Reviews

Paul Smiddy’s ‘Moonlight Crusaders’

By Kevin Seabrooke

A pilot since the age of 16, later trained by the RAF, the author has assembled a dashing narrative of the Royal Air Force’s Special Duties pilots, who performed clandestine operations such as inserting or extracting agents, dropping supplies, and flying secret missions into occupied Europe, often using aircraft like the Westland Lysander—noted for its Short Take-Off and Landing (STOLT) capabilities. Read more

The Battle of Svolder by Norwegian artist Nils Bergslien (1853–1928) depicts a small ship of Jomsvikings, a legendary order of Viking mercenaries attacking the carrying King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway around 1000 in the Baltic Sea. Legend has it that Olaf jumped into the sea rather than be captured.

Book Reviews

Don Hollway’s ‘Hammer of the Gods’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Viking literature has been popular since the 13th century and is more so than ever in the 21st, with television shows such as Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla, The Northman and The Last Kingdom (based on Bernard Cornwell’s books)—as well as the Viking-adjacent Game of Thrones (based on George R. Read more

Book Reviews

Jamie Holmes’s ‘The Free and the Dead’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Following the end of the Revolutionary War, parts of Florida reverted to Spain, becoming a continuing source of conflict boundaries, the presence of formerly enslaved people and Native Americans from the region attacking the United States. Read more

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