The notion of this book is very interesting. A Presidential biography written by a fellow President who is also a son. Parallels to the Adams family abound. George Bush the Elder, possessing a lifetime of experience in government, is like John Adams, also a one-term President. George W. Bush and John Quincy Adams are both sons who became President. Both sons had shortcomings which can be linked to their elite birth. Both sons knew how…
Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, has been much maligned for being a weak president. Certainly, there are things he wishes that he could redo. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see in this memoir what positive things he did accomplish and how honest he is about the unresolved problems of our world. Carter has been called the most-successful ex-president our country has ever had. He founded the Carter Center at Emory University and has spend a…
Catherine the Great is indisputably one of the greatest women Europe has ever produced. She ruled Russia as an enlightened monarch and spread the philosophy of its prior pro-European monarch Peter the Great. She created an intellectual culture in Russia that blossomed with talent like Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. Ironically, she was not born a Russian but a German. Her marriage to a future king was a failure, but not due to her lack of…
Author of the Canterbury Tales (among other works), Geoffrey Chaucer is a pioneer of the English language from the late middle ages. He is eclipsed in his innovations perhaps only by William Shakespeare. Peter Ackroyd is a modern British historian and a worthy biographer of this giant. In this accessible series (read: short books), Ackroyd provides us with a great summary of what there is to know about Chaucer from historical records. Chaucer was not…
When I studied the US Constitution for the first time in the late 1990s as a high-school student, I noticed that it gave Congress, not the Presidency, the responsibility of declaring war. This seemed contrary to my experience, in which the President led the nation into war. It is commonly said that the UN Charter, ratified by Congress, supersedes this earlier practice. Beschloss seeks to tackle this inconsistency head-on. By providing detailed historical analysis, he…
Teddy Roosevelt set the agenda for twentieth-century America. After assuming the presidency because of an assassination (McKinley), Roosevelt provided a successful progressive trajectory for the coming century. Because of him, America prospered and prospers still. He impacted just about every major area with his touch. He helped start the area of land conservation. He introduced legislation to improve transportation by ending the railway trust. In foreign policy, he mediated negotiations to end the Russian-Japanese War…
This highly acclaimed work (winning a Pulitzer Prize) deserves every one of its adulations. It is not only personal, erudite, and interesting; it is also inspiring and well-written. Mukherjee attempts to present “a biography of cancer,” starting from its first mention in the historical record (a Queen of Persia). A practicing oncologist, he also ties in patient stories to advance the narrative in appropriate places. Generally, he tells the tale of how humanity and science…
What was life like before Columbus ventured into the “New” World? Chances are you were taught in school that there was a lot of wilderness to tame and that American Indians sparsely filled the continents in a passive manner. Citing new research on many fronts, Mann contends that this picture is simply incorrect. The Americas have been filled with many civilizations that were more advanced, in some respects, than their European counterparts. They lived in…
Anyone who attempts to biography Jesus is bound to fail. An author is bound to project herself or himself onto the narrative. That’s why all theology eventually turns into autobiography. In Parini’s work, clearly, both the object (Jesus of Nazareth) and the subject (Parini the author) are worth learning from, and the reader can find much to aspire to. Much of late twentieth and early twenty-first century studies on the Jesus of history devolve into…
When was the last time you heard the word “polio?” It was probably in reference to a vaccine, not the disease. So thoroughly have the effects of polio vaccination been felt that less than 2,000 cases exist each year and only in remote regions of Nigeria, India, and Pakistan. Ridding the world of it forever (in other words, complete eradication, like with smallpox) is in sight. Polio once caused swimming pools and movie theaters to…