Category Archives: Book Reviews

How Egalitarian a Society Are We?

We like to have a positive view of ourselves and our country.  But every so often we find something that jars us into rethinking our complacency. I just ran across a review a book with the rather shocking title White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by historian Nancy Isenberg.  It proposes

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Book Review — End of the Cold War

Nothing is as simple as it first appears.  That’s my frustration with history — so much gets left out of the textbooks. I’ve just finished reading The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service.  It’s a very detailed, and heavily documented, account of the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin

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Book Review — Against All Enemies

I’m just finishing Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke (Free Press, 2004).  Richard Clarke spent almost 30 years in government under seven presidents.  He was appointed the first National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism (aka the Terrorism Czar, a term he hated) by President Bill Clinton, and

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Just Who Was Frankenstein?

I have always seen pictures of the Frankenstein monster, and film clips from various productions, but that was the extent of my exposure.  Lately I’ve gotten interested in classic literature (see my earlier piece on The Phantom of the Opera), and decided to read the original novel,  Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft

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