Tom Rider's Reviews

Too often the history of warfare ends with an armistice and peace treaty. Ben Shepherd continues the story of World War II into the early 1950s. His The Long Road Home is about the millions of individuals of all ages and nationalities who were forced to live for years after the war in German Displaced [...]

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A & P’s century of selling groceries is a remarkable story told well by Marc Levinson. Still if you were not the son of a grocer and had not once owned an independent book store, you would probably find getting through the book somewhat tedious.
The Great American Tea Company proliferated in the decade [...]

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We view the North American colonies as faraway from their imperial capital in the age of sail. But by the mid-eighteenth century there was a regular marine service between the two that took around a month and was relatively safe, though not comfortable. We forget that colonists, particularly those from the southern colonies and [...]

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With both the Elbe and Rhine frontiers breached by the early months of 1945, Germany had clearly lost the war. To understand why the Germans continued to give battle, Ian Kershaw looks at the German mindset and the National Socialist structures of political power.
Kershaw begins his book with the attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life in [...]

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Simon Montefiore has used the Stalin archives to look at the nature of Bolshevik leadership in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s through Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. He argues that the “magnates” constituted a court – hence courtiers – and infers that it resembles Russia’s pre-revolutionary tsarist regime. Buttressing that structure was the [...]

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