Book #26 of 2024: King: A Life by Jonathan Eig This 2023 title is a major new biography of the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., representing the first such work to be published in over three decades. It draws on extensive interviews with his surviving loved ones and colleagues, as well as …
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Book #14 of 2023: Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff This 2022 publication is a clear and exceedingly thorough account of the various misdeeds, investigations, and cover-ups that dogged the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Historian and journalist Garrett M. Graff has conducted no fresh interviews — which would not necessarily be possible …
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Book #127 of 2022: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff A mosaic firsthand account of how Americans in their own words experienced the unfolding tragedies of September 11th, 2001, drawing on author Garrett M. Graff’s interviews with hundreds of subjects as well as several thousand pre-existing …
Book #105 of 2022: The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin This nonfiction title explores an interesting and new-to-me topic, which is the obvious yet rarely-considered point that the seven-day cycle we know as a week is entirely cultural, having no relation to observable …
Book #69 of 2022: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz This book is primarily a biography of Smedley Darlington Butler, a now-obscure figure from the late nineteenth / early twentieth century who was once a household name as a military leader-turned-reformist. In …
Book #66 of 2022: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner This historical account of Germany following World War II is detailed and well-researched, tracing how the country’s population began transitioning from perpetrators, victims, and complicit bystanders of the Holocaust into participants in modern western democracy once more. But …
Book #56 of 2022: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith A deeply-moving account of author Clint Smith’s visits to sites across the country (and one abroad, in Senegal) that have links to slavery, from former plantations like Angola Prison and Jefferson’s Monticello estate to …
Book #53 of 2022: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy This 2015 title offers a decent crash-course on the history of the region that became today’s country of Ukraine, although author Serhii Plokhy spends a bit too much time on the events of early eras, which in addition to their …
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Book #51 of 2022: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine This volume is an expansion of the original New York Times Magazine article that was published to honor the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia, highlighting American history through …
Book #43 of 2022: The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman A whirlwind overview of the history, culture, technology, and politics of the titular decade in America — which, while acknowledging that such a construct is necessarily artificial, author Chuck Klosterman (born in 1972) argues is reasonably bounded by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 …
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