There are a few problems with this book but the main one is that it is simply too long. 800 pages on the Thirty Years War is just too much unless you have an extreme interest in the topic. I was interested in learning about the war because it is one of those topics that are skimmed over in European history classes and there really isn’t that much out there to read. Plus the start of the book makes it seem like it will be fun reading as he discusses how the war was started because of some Bohemian Protestants tossing the Emperor’s representatives out a window. But the book quickly drags with incredible unnecessary detail that for most people will be out of their head three pages later anyway. Yes, I did learn a lot about the war but with so much detail I didn’t enjoy learning it and a lot of what the book covered I have no memory of whatsoever.

Let’s compare this book to Desmond Seward’s book on the Hundred Years War. Seward covers his topic in sufficient detail in only 300 pages. That book moves quickly and is fun and interesting. But it takes Wilson eight chapters (almost 250 pages) to even get to the beginning of the Thirty Years War. And Wilson throws so many people and places at us without enough maps or family trees that trying to remember who’s who and where’s where makes the book even more frustrating. We get emperors, kings, dukes, princes, knights, bishops, generals, electors from German states, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Italy, Holland with cities, towns, provinces, principalities, protectorates and trying to keep track of who is in charge of what place and where that place is in relation to the next place is impossible or at least it was for me. The book has only two maps other than battle maps. One is a map of central Europe that lacks sufficient detail and the other is a map of Switzerland(!) that is mostly useless. The battle maps themselves look like something Wilson might have drawn on the back of a cocktail napkin. This is the 21st century so getting a clear and detailed map should not be a great difficulty. Try to imagine someone writing a book on World War II without including several maps showing the pitch and flow of the war across Europe during the 6 years of fighting. And as far as pictures go, the pictures on Wikipedia’s article on the war are better than anything you will find in this book.

But the main problem is that the book is way too long because Wilson feels a need to tell us everything about the war (and the 50 or so years before the war started) that his research dug up. Plus Wilson is a lousy writer. If Wilson had limited himself to even 500 pages and aimed his book at a reader other than the historian in the next office this book could have been worth reading. It’s too bad that Wilson didn’t use his first chapter as a model for writing the book.

Adrian Keith has written a detailed account of the end of the Roman Empire that makes a good argument for why the Empire fell. The book starts from the high point of the Empire in 150AD and works its way to the end of the Empire in the West in 476AD and beyond. Keith shows us how the Empire ultimately had a weak base simply because the man with the biggest army could make a claim to be Emperor. This meant that any general with a strong army could claim to be Emperor which meant that letting any general have a strong army was risky for an Emperor.

The main problem with the book is simply that so little information is available for this period. Keith explains that information such as the population of Rome or the number of soldiers in the army or the number of dead from a plague are simply not available. The information that is available was often written 100 years after the event or was written by biased authors (Christian authors writing about pagan emperors, for example). This means that there are a lot of blank spaces in the story. What was it like to live in Rome when the power of the Emperor had moved to other cities? What was it like to be a citizen of the Empire when civil wars (60 in the third century) were the normal condition of life? What was it like in the Empire during the transition from paganism to Christianity? But are all of these questions left unanswered because of lack of information or is it that Keith simply failed to discuss them? Surely some information must be available.

For me though, the main problem is the last 75 years of the story. Things didn’t seem too bad in 375AD but then a short time later the house of cards collapses. The Goths are defeated by Theodosius and yet 15 years later they are sacking Rome. I felt that Keith didn’t make it clear as to exactly why this happened. Why the Roman army ended up disappearing to the point where barbarians make up a good deal of the army is not made clear. But perhaps this is unknowable at this point. Was it plague? Was it the effect of civil wars? The effect of the splitting of the empire? All of these things? Keith doesn’t discuss this question in any detail leaving it mostly for the reader to guess.

But all in all I did enjoy this book and found Keith’s theories of why the empire fell to make sense and be presented in a way that makes them understandable. I finished the book feeling that I know a lot more about the fall of the Roman Empire and what replaced it. This is a tough subject for a writer because of the lack of first person narrative available for huge chunks of it but Keith does a good job with the information that is available.

Being half Czech, I was hoping that this book would give me an interesting history of the Czech people. Unfortunately the book is far from interesting and although it does cover the history it does it in a way that can only be described as boring at best. It is apparent (at least it seems that way) that the author did not do much research into the early history of Bohemia or at least didn’t care to spend much time writing about it.

The first half of the book bounces from ruler to ruler without making it clear what is going on and how it is effecting the Czech people. Rulers capture or marry to get this territory or that but the author just moves on without making it clear exactly what is going on. Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire but the author fails to describe what is going on there or what is going on in Europe in general. For example, the events leading up to Second Defenestration of Prague that started the Thirty Years War is so poorly described that the reader is left wondering why exactly the three gentlemen were tossed out the window.

The reason for this seems to be that the author’s main interest is the 20th century especially the most recent period starting with the 1990′s. The events starting with World War I are described in detail while the period prior to that is mostly skimmed through. This is not necessarily a bad thing but the book does make the claim to be a history of the Czechs and the land of the Bohemian Crown. If the author had a more interesting writing style I would have given the book 4 stars but I found it mostly a struggle to get through. Writing a history that covers 1,000 years does require the ability to make your subject interesting. Unfortunately the author mostly lacks that ability.

In February, 1894, Charley Becker put on the uniform of a New York City police officer. Twenty one years later, the state of New York executed him for murder. In 1894 the NYC police department was completely corrupt. The department was designed to make it impossible for a police officer to live on his salary, forcing him to accept bribes. Officers who gave trouble to their superiors were sent to outlying parts of the city where access to bribes from gamblers, pimps, and prostitutes was hard to find. Officers who maximized their bribes and passed a percentage of the money up the line to their superiors found themselves in the best parts of the city. Charley Becker found himself in the Tenderloin District of the city, an area called Satan’s Circus because of the gambling, prostitution, and all-night bars that provided plenty of money to a corrupt police officer. Becker maximized his money and slowly moved up the line, eventually becoming the head of the Strong Arm Squad responsible for raiding gambling houses. Becker filled his bank accounts using his position to protect those who paid him off.

This part of the book was amazing to me as I was unaware of how corrupt the New York City Police Department was even less than 100 years ago. Dash does a good job of showing what the city was like and how a police officer could make a fortune in this world. He keeps the story flowing well as we near the murder of Herman Rosenthal, the gambler who was the partner of Charley Becker. But it is with the murder that the story starts to drag and become unfocused. Dash does a poor job of describing the two trials of Becker and relating it to what was going on in the city at the time. The description of the trials is confusing as he fails to focus on the key witnesses or give a good description of how the trials unfolded. He doesn’t make it easy on us as he uses the first name, last name, and nickname of the same character sometimes on the same page. The last 80 pages of the book seem almost tacked on. Since we know how the story ends, Dash needs to find other ways to make the end of the book interesting but he isn’t able to do it.

Overall, the book is a fairly good read although it does drag in parts and the end could have used some help. If you are interested in the story of Charley Becker and the NYC police department and want to find out if he really was guilty (at least as well as can be found out 100 years later) then this book is well worth picking up.

You would think that reading and reviewing a book written ten years ago about American culture might be tricky. You would expect that so much has changed that a book like this would be more like a history lesson than a view into America. But surprisingly, in spite of all that has happened since the turn of the century, Vowell’s essays are as true and as a vibrant as when she wrote them. I have to admit that I am a fan of Vowell ever since I read her book Assassination Vacation. The best part of that book is Vowell taking us on a tour of America and making the history she finds relevant to today. This is a gift that she carries into these short essays.

Vowell takes us on a journey along the “Trail of Tears,” as she travels the same path which her Cherokee ancestors were forced to travel when they were driven from their homes by Americans. She spends a few days at the Chelsea Hotel where Sid Vicious might have killed Nancy Spungen. She heads to Hoboken to discover the town where Frank Sinatra grew up. She tells us the history of a street corner in Chicago and then explains the lessons she learned from taking band in high school and from watching the movie the “Godfather.”

The end result is a very enjoyable series of essays that hold up even though they are 10 years old. If you have enjoyed reading Vowell’s other books then I can heartily recommend this one.

I think it would be very difficult to create two characters who are more stereotyped than the two main characters in this story. We have Joe Rizzo, tough Italian detective who has been on the force forever and is just waiting to be able to afford to live off his pension and we have Mike McQueen, new college-educated detective who just came over from patrolling the streets of Manhattan and wants to get promoted back to a big-time job in Manhattan. And let’s not forget the African-American, lesbian patrol officer (who is revealed to have been a member of a motorcycle gang just when Rizzo and McQueen need one) to complete the triumvirate. Rizzo and McQueen don’t do much other than wander through a few cases and reveal that all cops are crooked, even the honest ones. They accept free food from a restaurant in payment for following the owner when he takes the day’s receipts to the bank. They claim a confession that never happened from a dead guy. It takes them two weeks to decide if promotions and bigger pensions in exchange for letting criminals get away with their crimes falls within the oath they took when they became cops. I have to admit that I didn’t like either Rizzo or McQueen.

As far as the story goes, nothing really happens. The detectives have a few cases but none of them are interesting, even the big one that completes the story. And the ending of that case is so contrived as to be unbelievable. And does NYC really have motorcycle gangs running through the city selling drugs and being ignored by the police? In a crime novel, the most important thing is making you care about something and then putting that something in some kind of danger. The detectives who we are supposed to care about, I assume, are never in any danger. The only character who is in danger we know virtually nothing about so it is hard to care what happens to her.

The writing itself is only fair at best. The author tells us about left and right turns in the Impala and Rizzo taking out another pack of Chesterfields and the two detectives talking on their Motorola radio. I expected to go to commercial any minute. But it is fast and easy reading. You can probably blow through this book in a couple of days… and then move on to something better.

Nate Stanley is offered a job as a deputy sheriff in Oregon and accepts it against his wife, Irene’s, opinion. He drags his family 2,000 miles to their new home and then soon after their arrival, the Stanley’s son, Shep, is murdered. The next part of the book is about anger and forgiveness as we watch the young man found guilty of this crime prepare for his execution. This is by far the best part of the book as we watch each member of the Stanley family (but mostly Irene) learn to live with the death of Shep. I will admit that the characters are a bit overdone in this section, Shep is made out be an angel on Earth, but the writing flows well and the story holds together very well.

But it is the last 1/3 of the book that ruins the story. If the author had simply followed through with the story without trying to add a crazy twist, this would have been a very good story. Instead she adds an absurdity to the story. I don’t want to give it away but imagine if you were reading a story about a man trapped on a 20th floor balcony in a fire. Smoke is billowing out of the windows. Will he somehow survive? Can he be rescued? Suddenly an expert on fires appears and explains that the smoke actually isn’t smoke but steam from a leaky steam pipe. But there is still nothing that can be done and the person might as well jump. And everyone agrees. Huh? That is absurd! And yet that is the kind of absurdity that happens in the story.

The worst part is that the book was so good before the final part. The characters felt real and I felt like I could understand them. I was interested to see how the story would play out. But then the author created an unbelievable situation that ruined the story for me. Reading some of these reviews, it appears that some people were able to accept the absurdity that I could not but I can’t recommend this book.

In the Spring of 1954, Senator Joe McCarthy was one of the most feared men in Washington. In the Summer of 1954, McCarthy had lost his power and no one was afraid of him. What happened in between was the Army-McCarthy hearings and why the hearings changed everything was because they were on TV. For thirty-six days, America got to see Joe McCarthy and what they saw they didn’t like. His fall from grace in the eyes of America gave the Senate the nerve to censure him.

This is the story of those hearings but more it is the story of how television changed the world. The book starts with an introduction to McCarthy and how he came to power by using accusations of communism without actually finding any communists. It also introduces us to how early television covered the news and how the first televised Congressional hearings (the Kefauver organized crime hearings) changed how the public viewed Congress. But all this leads to a detailed look at the Army-McCarthy hearings and how McCarthy’s massive ego led to his downfall.

The book is very well written by a journalist turned historian. Far from a dry historical outlook, the book is written as a fascinating, fast moving (less than 300 pages) view of a few short months of American history. Shogan then ties those events to today showing how TV news has and hasn’t changed through Vietnam, Watergate, and 9/11. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.

This book is a collection of short stories with the vague link of occurring in separate generations of one family. The author tries to show a history of quack medicine through the eyes of one family but really the link to the single family is vague at best and does nothing to make the stories better or make them more interesting. Each chapter is a separate story that has little or no relation to the prior story so they either stand alone or not. For the most part they do not.

The first story is a perfect example of poor writing. The main character is a doctor doing research to help his mother who has a mental illness. But the author gives the doctor some kind of seizure disorder in which he rapes and murders people when he has seizures. Contrary to the author’s beliefs People with seizure disorders are not dangerous killers. The second story has to do with a doctor (the son of the doctor in the prior story) who believes in spontaneous combustion fighting to help a man who murdered his wife. This could have been an interesting story but in the hands of this author it goes nowhere. The third story is about a developmentally disabled adult who is treated by the son of the doctor in chapter two. In this story, the author seems to be under the impression that the developmentally disabled are dangerous and will potentially attack any woman they are attracted to. And so on.

Overall, I found the stories poorly written and less than interesting. The characters were flat and unbelievable. The endings felt like a page limit had been reached more than the story had reached its logical conclusion. I would recommend that you don’t waste your time with this book.

The cover of my copy of this book quotes reviews from the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly that describe the book as wildly, unpredictably, and searingly funny and as absurdly hilarious. I can only assume the the authors of those reviews either didn’t read the same book as I did or have very different senses of humor. The word “hilarious” is especially over the top for this book. I will admit that I was mildly amused three or four times while reading and perhaps even laughed out loud once but that was it. But, that isn’t to say that this was a bad book. In fact, I would say that it was actually a fairly good read. It just wasn’t very funny.

Sam Pulsifer, the narrator of this story, accidentally burned down Emily Dickinson’s house and killed two tour guides who were making love on Emily Dickinson’s bed. No one believes it was an accident so Sam goes to prison for eight years. Getting out, he finds true love and they marry but he fails to mention his past to her which means he has to pretend his parents are dead. When the grown up child of the tour guides (they were married) shows up to make Sam’s life miserable, the story goes into a strange narrative involving Sam’s lies, his parents’ lies, more writers house’s being burned down, and a quest for understanding in a world where no one is who they seem to be. Sam is an odd character and his actions are often hard to accept but if you can ignore the often unbelievable behaviors the story is actually a decent read. It isn’t a bad story but the ending was a bit of a disappointment.

Overall the book isn’t as good as the over-inflated reviews it has been receiving but it is not as bad as some of the other reviews. So don’t get carried away by all the positive reviews covering it front and back (and the first four pages as well) into thinking this is some great novel. It’s not bad but there are plenty of other better books out there to read.