Book Summaries

(other books consulted (numbering 459) are listed under bibliography)

MOST RECENT

Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain: the crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

PH Liotta and James F Miskel, The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security & the Map of the Future

GENERAL

Ahamed, Liquat, Lords of Finance, (about the Great Depression

Appleby, Joyce, The Relentless Revolution: a History of Capitalism

Blackmon, Douglas A, Slavery by Another Name: the Re-Enslavement of Black Americans ...

Bobbitt, Philip, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History

Boot, Max, War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today

Chua, Amy, Day of Empire: Why Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall

Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: a Brief Economic History of the World

Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Durant, Will and Ariel, The Lessons of History

Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War: A New History

Hanson, Victor Davis, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

Moore Jr, Barrington, Moral Purity and Persecution in History

Painter, Nell Irvin, The History of White People

Richardson, Louise, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat

SCIENCE-PHILOSOPHY

Arendt, Hannah, On Violence

Burnham and Phelan, Mean Genes: from Sex to Money to Food – Taming Our Primal Instincts

Honderich, Ted, How Free Are You?

Maalouf, Amin, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

Neiman, Susan, Evil in Modern Thought

Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

Searle, John R., Mind: a brief introduction

ANTIQUITY

Burns, Thomas S., Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C. – A.D. 400

Dever, William G. What Did the Bible Writers Know and When Did They Know It

Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did they Come From

Jahoda, Gustav, Images of Savages

Kagan, Donald, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace

Otterbain, Keith, How Wars Began

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Old Way: a Story of the First People

Tougher, Shaun, ed., Eunuchs in Antiquity & Beyond

CHINA, MODERN

Cheng, Nien, Life and Death in Shanghai

CUBA

English, T.J., Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba...And then Lost it to the Revolution

MIDDLE AGES

Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel

Huizinga, Johan, The Autumn of the Middle Ages

Kuran, Timur, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East

Secher, Reynald, A French Genocide

Zagorin, Perez, How the Idea of Religious Toleration came to the West

GERMANY

Clark, Christopher, Kaiser Wilhelm II

Machtan, Lothar, The Hidden Hitler

Meisner, Hans-Otto, Magda Goebbels

Mombauer, Annika, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War

Rinderle and Norling, Nazi Impact on a German Village

Scheck, Raffael, Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-win Politics, 1914-1930

Steger, Manfred B., The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism

JAPAN

Bix, Herbert P., Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Takemae Eiji, The Allied Occupation of Japan

Watanabe, Kiyoshi, Shattered God (Kudakareta Kami)

ISLAM

Berkey, Jonathan P., The Formation of Islam [600 to 1800]

Esposito and Mogahed: Who Speaks for Islam?

Feldman, Noah, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State

THE MIDDLE EAST

Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinians: A History

Oren, Michael B., Six Days of War

Rosen, Nir, In the Belly of the Green Bird: the Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.

Trofimov, Yaroslav, The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising ... and the Birth of al Qaeda

Trofimov, Yaroslav, A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu

SOVIET UNION AND RUSSIA

Breslauer, George W., Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders

Cohen, Stephen F., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

Gorbachev, Mikael, Gorbachev: On My Country and the World

SPAIN

Ashford Hodges, Gabrielle, Franco: a Concise Biography

VIETNAM

Moyar, Mark, Triumph Forsaken

UNITED KINGDOM, INDIA

Herman, Arthur, Churchill & Gandhi

Olson, Lynne, Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels who brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England

UNITED STATES

Berkin, Carol, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution

Bradley, James, Flags of Our Fathers

Brands, H.W., Andrew Jackson

Carlson, Lewis H., Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War

Carson, Ben, The Big Picture

Crier, Catherine, Contempt: How the Right is Wronging American Justice

Das, Satyajit, Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

Divine, Robert, Eisenhower and the Cold War

Fukuyama, Francis, The Great Disruption

Hoover, Herbert, Freedom Betrayed

Jacoby, Susan, The Age of American Unreason

Krugman, Paul, The Conscience of a Liberal

Livingston and Groden, High Treason

Margolich, David, Beyond Glory: Joe Lewis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink

Michelmore, Molly, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism

Murphy, Cullen, Are We Rome?

Rabe, Stephen G., Eisenhower, the Foreign Policy of Anti-communism and Latin America

Regnery, Alfred S., Upstream: the Ascedance of American Conservatism

Scalia, Antonin, A Matter of Interpretation

Speer, Lonnie, War of Vengeance: Acts of Retaliation against Civil War POWs

Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-five

Zakaria, Fareed, The Post American World

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