Short Book Reviews: Presidential History

February 17, 2025

The following seven short book reviews cover a wide-range of topics related to the American presidency. Two works on Lincoln, from renowned historian David Herbert Donald and travel author Jan Morris, explore the multifaceted life and times of America’s greatest president. Doris Kearns Goodwin, an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson and acclaimed presidential historian, gives us a penetrating portrait into LBJ and an insightful meditation on presidential leadership. Michael Dobbs’ day-by-day breakdown of the Watergate scandal and the downfall of President Richard Nixon is a gripping account of a presidency in crisis. The short presidency of Warren G. Harding has been much maligned by historians, but Ryan Walters’ revisionist history of the “Jazz Age President” will make you take a second look at Harding and his accomplishments. Finally, in master historian H.W. Brands’ book on FDR and Charles Lindbergh, we see the debate between internationalism and isolationism, a debate of growing importance in our era.

Short Book Reviews: Politics and the American Empire

August 21, 2024

The United States is an empire, despite its democratic pretensions, and it is up to an informed citizenry to counteract that nefarious trajectory and reassert the values of the republic. The books discussed below provide us with the tools to do just that.

From left to right: Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Images from the *Boston Globe*, Smithsonian Institution, Reuters, and Unsplash.

Short Book Reviews: Rick Perlstein’s History of the American Right

June 17, 2024

Perlstein weaves together varying strands of historical knowledge, such as economics, foreign policy, cultural trends, and even religious transformations. And as a man of the liberal left, Perlstein pulls no punches with the political order that emerged in the era of his study. Goldwater was a political neophyte; Nixon a calculating bully; and finally Reagan, whose outsized presence in history stands as the culmination of the corporate class’s victory over social democracy in America.

Short Book Reviews: Science and Society

June 3, 2024

While many of my book reviews have been longer essays published on my blog or episodes of my podcast, Red Reviews, I also write shorter book reviews for social media. These appear mostly on Instagram, as it is the social media platform I primarily use and it has a longer character limit for captions than, say, Threads or Twitter. Instagram’s 2,200 character limit for captions requires you to be concise and clear, and I enjoy the challenge to keep my posts within that character limit. It’s actually a lot of fun to write a quick review that is informative as well as indicative of my opinion. This blog post will be the first in a series of blog posts where I will share a few reviews that are connected by a common theme, along with photographs of the books as they appeared on Instagram.

This first set of reviews are tied together under the theme of “science and society,” which highlights books that employ science and/or philosophy to expound on social issues. From Bertrand Russell’s argument for a four-hour workday to Christopher Lasch’s conception of a “minimal self,” each of these books provide provocative insights into the human condition.

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