On May 6, 1945, a twin-engine kamikaze plane’s bomb exploded beside the destroyer Luce, part of the radar picket ship screen surrounding Okinawa, and ripped her starboard side “like a sardine can.”
Unless we in the USA acknowledge not only the heroic, but also heinous deeds of our past, we will fail to face our future with the courage needed to overcome such ills as racism and our present political polarization.
In the new and magisterial study Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War, Tim Bouverie incisively reconstructs the ideological landscape of post-WWI Britain to explain how Chamberlain and other politicians and pundits misread Hitler and ultimately allowed the Third Reich to threaten the entire world order.
America’s rapid emergence as a global superpower after 1945 is the subject of Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower 1945-1957. Author Derek Leebaert challenges the conventional wisdom that an exhausted Great Britain voluntarily “handed the baton” of world leadership to the U.S. after World War II.
Greg Grandin's The End of the Myth, David McCullough's The Pioneers, and Angela Stent's Putin’s World push us to consider and compare the history of the frontier and borders.
When reading Katz’s book, we are reminded that as complex and difficult as the Syrian strike was, any similar action on Iran’s nuclear capability would be infinitely more daunting and riskier.
While Black lapses into a biased apologia and generalizes at the expense of factual evidence, Imperial Legacies, on the whole, delivers a long overdue re-contextualization of the British Empire.
While Richard Nixon’s rise and fall has been repeatedly examined — there are more than a dozen biographies of him — John Farrell’s book, Richard Nixon, a Life, offers many new insights.
