An Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore Paperback, $23.95 St. Martin’s Press June 2006 328 pages I’m going to try something a little different for this review.  This book is so important, so full of potential to affect real change, that nothing I say in response can possibly compare.  Therefore, I will let the book speak for itself: “In Antarctica, [...]

Florence Nightingale

Mark Bostridge Hardcover, $35 Farrar, Straus & Giroux October 2008 672 pages Last month my roommate and I watched a fairly awful made-for-TV-movie called Florence Nightingale starring one Jaclyn Smith.  The film ended abruptly as Florence’s time in the Crimea was coming to a close, and since I knew that she had lived to be [...]

High School Confidential

Jeremy Iversen Hardcover, $19.95 Atria 2006 447 pages 24-year old Jeremy Iversen had the brilliant idea that he should go back to high school undercover and relive his youth while investigating the “truth” about modern American teenagers and our education system.  On the surface, an interesting prospect, but Iversen managed to screw up just about [...]

The Lost City of Z

David Grann Hardcover, $27.50 Doubleday February 2009 352 pages Once again this is a fantastic book borrowed from my buddy Dustin.  I’m starting to think he has pretty good taste. Z is the name given to a theorized ancient city located in the Amazon.  Many Victorian explorers believed in the existence of a lost civilization [...]

The Forger’s Spell

Edward Dolnick Hardcover, $26.99 HarperCollins June 2008 368 pages This is a fantastic non-fiction book subtitled A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century.  Vermeer?  Nazis?  How could I pass this up!? Dolnick is a master storyteller, particularly when it comes to true crime.  He has the rare [...]

The Jesus Dynasty

James D. Tabor Paperback, $16.00 Simon & Schuster April 2006 400 pages James D. Tabor is a biblical scholar and archaeologist who spent decades studying the earliest extant documents concerning Jesus, his movement, and the beginnings of Christianity.  In this book, he uses those documents and his archaeological finds to construct the history of Jesus’s [...]

Princess Alice

Carol Felsenthal Paperback, $19.95 St. Martin’s Press December 2003 340 pages Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt and wife of Senator Nick Longworth, but she carved out a place in Washington that was all her own.  History has largely forgotten Alice, but this captivating biography restores her to her proper position.  [...]

The Summer of 1787

David O. Stewart Paperback, $15.00 Simon & Schuster April 2007 368 pages This is a great history of those momentous few months when our nation’s sharpest political minds got together to shape the government.  It’s very accessible (endnotes are at the back, you don’t even have to look at them if you don’t want to!) [...]