Original Reviews

          Richard Goldstein’s title is taken from the hit song “New York, New York, It’s a Helluva of a Town.” It was in a Broadway musical called On the Town, a salute to the US Navy, which opened in 1944. The Army also had its musical review This is the Army with songs by Irving [...]

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           Gagadeesh Gokhale is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank. This reviewer happily receives his Social Security check every month and is more dependent upon that revenue stream that he had planned.
          Gokhale contends that the capacity of the US economy to meet its Social Security future obligations is in [...]

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           Men to Boys argues that men are refusing to grow up. Boyfriends are stalling about getting married, those wedded having families. Late teens avoid entering the workforce. Men hide out in their garages rather than being a father to their children. And this contemporary immaturity is being fed by our commercial culture. Admitting to [...]

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           Mark Neely persuades us that historians have it wrong about the unlimited destructiveness of the American Civil War. Certainly the war was both destructive of southern cities and deadly for those civilians caught in its cross fire. But it was not the ‘total warfare’ associated with the twentieth century. For the most part belligerents [...]

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          While there is much interest in the Civil War and World War II, World War I (The Great War) is less well served by the publishing industry. The Remains of Company D is a notable exception. Nelson centers his chronicle of Company D on his grandfather. John Nelson and Company D arrived in France [...]

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           The Acropolis in Athens and particularly the Parthenon is one of those places that, no matter how glorious the anticipation, the viewer is never disappointed. Mary Beard’s book is both a guide to the site and a short history of its renown over the millennia.
At the foot of the Acropolis a modern museum with [...]

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         Richard Wrangham is a biological anthropologist, a scholarly specialization that looks at human evolution in the context of other primates. In Catching Fire, he seeks to go understand the fossil record of human ancestory by looking at contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures.
The manipulation of fire began much earlier, he argues, than generally assumed. The genus Homo [...]

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          Most of us will have to work hard to remember much about the period 1789 to 1815 from our high school and college US history survey courses. Gordon Wood has made these twenty-six years important and also interesting. Empire of Liberty is not revisionist history; Wood is celebrating the accomplishments of the founding fathers, [...]

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          Professor Elena Osokina gave an interesting paper at a UF conference last spring. Her book, Our Daily Bread, describes the ways in which the Soviet Union alternatively promoted and suppressed a market economy. And even when suppressed and illegal, markets continued to play an essential role in the economy.
          Economic policy under Joseph Stalin [...]

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          The war between Russia and France, Doninic Lieven contends, has mostly been told from the point of view of the French or the British. He argues, however, that it was the Russian people and their czar that broke the back of Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies.
He begins with the negotiations at Tilset (in former East Prussia) [...]

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