History – Page 15 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Review: Poems on Slavery.

By Scott J. Pearson | April 2, 2019May 28, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

Poems on Slavery. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow My rating: 4 of 5 stars This collection, published in 1842, vividly describes the predicament of slavery. It makes a case of natural philosophy of why slavery is immoral. Works like Longfellow’s began to sway the northern U.S. towards the the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery (through the bloody carnage of the Civil War, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution). What…

Review: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

By Scott J. Pearson | March 28, 2019May 28, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard My rating: 4 of 5 stars This nineteenth-century, post-Civil-War story, like almost all stories, intertwines the lives of several people. Key characters include U.S. President James Garfield, Alexander Graham Bell, Garfield’s assassin, Garfield’s chief doctor/surgeon, Bell’s wife and son, Garfield’s wife, and Vice President Chester Arthur. An assassin – clearly mentally ill, probably with bipolar disorder –…

Biography-Memoir History Leadership

Review: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

By Scott J. Pearson | March 23, 2019September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin My rating: 5 of 5 stars This in-depth look into the lives of Lincoln and his closest advisors meets the hype. It tells the life histories of President Lincoln, his attorney general Bates, his treasury secretary Chase, and his secretary of state Seward. All four had a chance of being nominated as the Republican candidate in Chicago, but Lincoln secured the nod.…

Biography-Memoir History

Review: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

By Scott J. Pearson | February 28, 2019May 28, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass My rating: 0 of 5 stars Obviously, this work belongs to history rather than to a shelf of recent releases. Nonetheless, it is clearly written, interesting, and provides much insight into the mind of nineteenth-century Americans in the North, in the South, and in slavery. I found Douglass’s writing abundantly lucid and to the point. It’s interesting how American in many ways represented two societies…

Fiction-Stories History

Review: Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

By Scott J. Pearson | February 24, 2019May 28, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton My rating: 0 of 5 stars This book, widely recognized as a classic – or perhaps the classic – in the field of mythology, provides not just Hamilton’s scholarship over a lifetime of classical myths; it provides Hamilton’s outlay for how to live the good life. She respects and admires the Greek and Roman cultures whose myths she portrays – so much so that she…

Fiction-Stories History

The Underground Railroad

By Scott J. Pearson | December 26, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Colson WhiteheadCopyright (c) 2016 I picked up this book because it won a Pulitzer for Whitehead and because it had the recommendation of Barack Obama, who reads widely. I was not let down. Its picturesque depiction of slavery and of slavery’s effects brought this historical event to life to me. Further, Whitehead vividly shows how the human heart – even those from “uncivilized” Africa – longs universally for freedom. I read it cover-to-cover in…

Biography-Memoir History

Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton

By Scott J. Pearson | December 11, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Tilar J. MazzeoCopyright (c) 2018 Like many, I fell in love with the protagonist of Broadway’s biggest hit in recent years Hamilton. The true protagonist of that story is not Alexander Hamilton but his wife Eliza Hamilton. Her life as one of our country’s founding mothers brings accolades that stack up well alongside her husband’s. She bore seven children. Mindful of her husband’s past and her children’s present, she helped found the country’s first…

History Software-Technology

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

By Scott J. Pearson | November 30, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Frederick P. BrooksCopyright (c) 1995 What is relevant about a book, in its second edition, that was originally written a generation or two ago about managing computer projects? The author Brooks led the management of the project for IBM decades ago. The answer to this question is simple and is evident in the title. Scaling software projects from smaller-to-larger does not scale linearly. In case you don’t know what this means, scaling non-linearly means…

Biography-Memoir History Religion-Philosophy

The Life of Thomas More

By Scott J. Pearson | November 27, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Peter Ackroyd Copyright (c) 1998 Thomas More is one of the few beatified English lay-persons in history. He was beheaded for resisting the coming Protestant Reformation. What comes around, goes around, however; More, in the years before King Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, oversaw the exercise of the death penalty to several Protestant heretics. He stood, as Ackroyd tells it, for the old way of medieval Christendom. He was unwilling to accommodate the…

Books History

Resources to Explore: History

By Scott J. Pearson | November 27, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine edited by Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Soderqvist Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas edited by Carroll Pursell and Merritt Roe Smith