Tom Rider's Reviews

Ross Perlin. Intern Nation; How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. Verso, 2011.
Internships have a favorable aura about them. Ross Perlin intends to dissuade us from our unexamined acceptance. You hear various rhetorics in defense of internships. Kids with college educations need to pay back to society some of [...]

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Stefan Kanfer. Tough Without a Gun; The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart. Knopf, 2011.
Stefan Kanfer borrows from the many previous biographies of Humphrey Bogart. He credits a continuing interest in Bogart, this afterlife, to the enthusiasm on college campuses for Bogart’s films. Bogart died of throat cancer in 1957 and with him [...]

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Steven Woodworth. Manifest Destinies; America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War. Knopf, 2010.
The phrase “manifest destiny” originated with a nineteenth-century American journalist who argued that it was the American republics manifest destiny “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” Steven Woodworth has taken manifest destiny as the theme of his history of [...]

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Tammy Proctor. Civilians in a World at War, 1914 to 1918. New York University Press, 2010.
We now call it collateral damage. The suffering imposed on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan is nothing new, however. In fact many of the patterns of warfare that we associate with World War II and wars since were already in [...]

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Sarah Helm. A Life in Secrets; Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of World War II. Anchor Books, 2007. Paper.
Just after the fall of France in May 1940, the British organized the SOE (Special Operations Executive,) a secret agency that was part of M16 (Social Intelligence Service). Its purpose was to provide intelligence and to [...]

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Joseph Lelyveld. Great Soul; Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. Knopf, 2011.
Joseph Lelyveld has chosen to focus on what he considers to be the important events that shaped Gandhi’s “experiments with truth” It is interesting that Lelyveld spends 40% of his book describing Gandhi’s activities in South Africa from 1902 to 1915.
Mohandas Gandhi [...]

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Luke Timothy Johnson. Among the Gentiles; Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity. Yale University Press, 2009.
Luke Timothy Johnson’s views on the relationship between Christian and Greco-Roman religious observance emphasize the importance the latter of the religious milieu of early Christianity. Thus Christianity, Johnson contends, continues the moral philosophical traditions of classical Greece and Rome. Christians, on [...]

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Shelley Baranowski. Nazi Empire; German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge University Press, 2010, paper.
Shelly Baranowski’s Nazi Empire covers seventy-five years of German imperial history from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871, the third of three wars which forged the German Empire around the old Prussian state. However, Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian [...]

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Harvey Sachs. The Ninth; Beethoven and the World in 1824. Random House, 2010.
Ludwig Beethoven premiered his Ninth Symphony in Vienna in the Kärntnertor Theater in May 1824. The first three movements of the Ninth were much admired for their daring. But it is the fourth movement that was the most innovative; the first time [...]

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Edward Berenson. Heroes of Empire; Five Charismatic men and the Conquest of Africa. University of California Press, 2010.
In the years from 1870 to 1914, European imperial powers scrambled to establish colonies in Africa. This quest for empire had various motives. To end the trade in slaves between tropical Africa and Arab North Africa and [...]

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