Tom Rider's Reviews

By the year 2030, seventy million Americans will be over sixty-five. And a growing portion of those older Americans will live into their late 80s and 90s. Susan Jacoby asks us to think about how we are going to finance the health care bill. And how can we help them lead the good life given [...]

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Timothy Snyder’s history of Eastern Europe in the last two centuries covers Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine during some terrible years. He begins, however, on a more glorious note, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth established at the Union of Lublin in 1569.
The Commonwealth prospered in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Stretching from the Baltic to the [...]

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James McPherson won a Pulitzer Prize for his Battle Cry of Freedom; The Civil War Era published a decade ago. Nevertheless he admits that he and other Civil War historians have neglected Abraham Lincoln’s role as Commander in Chief of the Union armies. This book is intended to remedy that lacuna.
President Lincoln was rushed [...]

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The defeat of the Ottoman armies before Vienna in 1529 is often viewed as the turning point in the struggle between Christian Europe and the Moslem East. Roger Crowley argues that naval warfare in the Mediterranean in the half century between the fall of Rhodes in 1522 and the defeat of the Ottoman navy at [...]

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Infinite Jest was published in association with a recent exhibition of graphic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Caricature or graphic satire is, it turns out, a relatively new subject for artists. Though there are antecedents that date back to the Renaissance, its flourishing had to await the age of affordable [...]

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Carthage, located in present-day Tunisia, was founded by Phoenicians from Tyre in the ninth century B.C. That, at least, is the date of the earliest archeological evidence. Tyre and its sister cities, Sidon, Byblos, Beirut, and Arvad, all on the Lebanon and Syrian coasts, made their living as mercantile intermediaries between the Greek colonies scattered [...]

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