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The Lost Symbol, Reviewed by Praniet Chopra
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown[1] narrates the story of Professor Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, who is deceptively invited to Washington by a psychopathic murderer on a quest to find the...
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The Sleepwalkers, Reviewed by Josh Doyle – Raso
The history of the genesis of the First World War has been addressed by countless historians due to its complex nature. Historians point to structural conditions, the attitudes of each state’s...
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The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, Reviewed by Francesca Bucchi
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (2008) is a bestseller written by Ian Mortimer, an English writer and historian with a BA and PhD in history from the University of Exeter. The book is...
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Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Reviewed by Tara Davis
In Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky (1997) spins a refreshingly intimate narrative on the relationship between humans and the environment. He attempts to understand...
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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Reviewed by Costa Valettas
In 1417, Poggio Braccolini, ex-papal secretary, seasoned book-hunter and humanist par excellence, discovered a forgotten copy of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura tucked away on the shelf of a German...
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At the Dark End of the Street, Reviewed by Matt Garry
At the Dark End of the Street is a book about the African-American civil rights movement in the United States from the 1940s into the 1970s. This period saw the breakdown of institutional racism,...
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It’s here….
The desert island book club has arrived! All the reviews are on this page…scroll down and enjoy! You can also link to reviews via the individual links tabs under “Recent Posts” in the margin on the...
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Wolfgang Schivelbush’s Tastes of Paradise by Marian
Historians tend to classify Modernity as an historical period: this underscores how much the qualification of « modern » is first and foremost the result of the gradual emergence of an industrialized...
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Sapiens – Inducing Humans to Rethink Humanity, Reviewed by Noah
The book Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, has won international acclaim in the few short years since it was published. Though Harari is a professor and historian,...
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The Professor and the Madman, Reviewed by Michele
In his book “The Professor and the Madman”, Simon Winchester sets off to narrate how the Oxford English Dictionary was firstly conceived and then realized. As the title hints, the author constructs...
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The Logic of Exclusion, Reviewed by Tristan
Fukuyama uses a body of empirical evidence to support the thesis that history has an inner universal logic, and, unlike many historians, is self-consciously moralizing historical events. My purpose...
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Oliver Stone’s Alexander Revisited, Reviewed by Jeremy
Oliver Stone’s Alexander Revisited vividly reintroduced the life of Alexander III of Macedon, arguably the most eternally revered conqueror in Western culture. The film is narrated by Ptolemy, a...
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A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Reviewed by Naomi
In 1930, resident New Yorkers met an unexpected sight: white-collar workers, throughout the city, braving the shame of the breadline. And so, after some camera flashes, one of the most iconic...
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David McCullough’s 1776, Reviewed by Emma
1776 by David McCullough is the account of the year 1776 during the age of the American Revolution. It is the account of George Washington’s troops in the ‘Continental Army’ and the reality they...
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Borgia (2011) and the Black Myth of the Borgia Family, Reviewed by Jennifer
The chronicle of the Borgia family reads like fiction: the crimes they are supposedly responsible sound unbelievable. Salacious details of the misdeeds of the Borgia, which was one of the rich and...
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Apocalypse: The Second World War, Reviewed by David
Foreword: Due to the length and complexity of the series, Apocalypse: The Second World War, as well as the word count limit, I have chosen to analyze the first three episodes: Aggression (1933-1939),...
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John Adams, Reviewed by Griffin
Historical narratives regarding the American Revolution are typically romanticized to a certain degree in order to be palatable to American audiences. As a result the founding fathers are generally...
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Historical Narrative and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Reviewed...
In The Devil in the White City: Murder Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Erik Larson tells the story of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair from the perspective of two vastly different...
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Did the Irish Really Save Civilization?, Reviewed by Alex
How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe written by Thomas Cahill, is an interesting chronicle of the role the...
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Les Ordres, Reviewed by Charles
L’histoire peut se présenter sous plusieurs formes. Au contraire de certains domaines plus spécifiques, l’histoire semble contenir une portée universelle. Il est clair que les académiciens de ce champ...
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Red Army Film Review, Reviewed by Sabrina
The story that was heard all over the world was about a group of scrappy and amateur American college hockey players who competed for gold against the robotic Soviet Union hockey team, at the 1980...
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Hamilton: A Revolutionary Manumission Abolitionist?, Reviewed by Ilya
Throughout the biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow usually gives readers a choice of interpretation, placing different versions of events which are debatable “within [their] ‘context’”,...
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The Fall of Berlin 1945, Reviewed by Jonathan
Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 explores the final battles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the Red Army advanced towards Berlin. As a military history book, The Fall of Berlin...
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The Mongols: Barbarians, Conquerors, and Renaissance Enablers, Reviewed by...
“Europeans experienced a Renaissance, literally a rebirth, but it was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the...
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The Rise and Fall of Prussia, Reviewed by Ashley
Published in 1980, The Rise and Fall of Prussia is a concise book on the history of Prussia from the middle ages up to the abdication of the German emperor after WWI. The book was first published in...
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Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance,...
Overlooking the city of Izmir is the face of Mustafa Kemal carved from the rock mountainside. Kemal’s eyes seemingly keep watch over the city his nationalist forces “liberated”, thereby honoring the...
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The Dawn of the Second Elizabethan Age, The Twilight of the British Empire:...
One hundred gowns made of organza, Crêpe de Chine, and Shantung silk, each adorned with sprigs of native wild flowers from across the British Empire. Fifty pairs of shoes, thirty-six hats, and a young...
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The Americans, Reviewed by Amanda
The television show, The Americans, follows the lives of two Soviet spies living in America during the Cold War. Airing from 2013 into 2017 and produced by a former CIA agent, the show has garnered...
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Hayden White and John Reed: Between Narration and Narrativization, Reviewed...
In “Ten Days That Shook the World”, John Reed presents his eye-witness accounts of the Bolshevik Revolution. From the March Strikes until the formation of the Soviet government, Reed provides a...
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Tony Judt’s Postwar, reviewed by Alanna
Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is a true volume of historical information. Judt builds the history of Europe since the end of the Second World war into a single, sweeping...
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