History | ReadSusanBerry

Posts from the ‘History’ category

Savage Harvest is controlled chaos. I really wanted to give between four and five stars to Carl Hoffman’s extensive biographical investigation into Michael Rockefeller’s death in a remote Asmat village located in New Guinea. However, like Chaos: Charles Manson, the Cia, and the Secret History…

Review of Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman

August 23, 2022

Political parties according to Goodwyn quoting William V. Allen, then U.S. Senator from Nebraska “should be held no more sacred than a man’s shoes or garments” and that political parties should exist only as long as they are “conducive to good government.” Goodwyn suggests that…

Review of Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America

March 8, 2022

Siobhan’s latest novel (published in 2021) merges a modern-day granddaughter Charlotte who discovers a picture of the recently deceased grandmother, Elena with another young woman from when both served in the WWII Italian Resistance. Intrigued by the picture and puzzled by her grandmother’s cryptic words…

The Girl From Venice by Siobhan Daiko

October 16, 2021

Sebba expertly reviews and relives Ethel Rosenberg’s life and death in her newest biography, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy for Rosenberg’s death was a tragedy. While there are questions as to her guilt, whatever the level, it did not merit the death penalty or even…

Ethel Rosenberg – Review of Two Books

April 8, 2021

Richard Breitman’s account of U.S. Foreign Service Senior Consul Raymond Geist’s heroic efforts at warning FDR and other high U.S. officials of the evil of Hitler’s grandiose plans to conquer and dominate the world and Geist’s efforts from the mid to late 1930’s through the…

Review of Richard Breitman’s The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within

September 7, 2019

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Taylor’s account of the train wreck of the Fitzgerald marriage of two clearly incompatible people was hard to read, not because of Taylor’s writing but due to the extensive disastrous consequences visited on others. Scott and Zelda consumed and destroyed so many lives. Notwithstanding other…

Review of Kendall Taylor’s The Great Gatsby: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic

August 22, 2019

WWII, the Nazi’s, the Resistance, and Vichy France come alive in Aaron Rockett’s Fake Papers: Survival Lessons from Grandma’s Escape. When I first started reading Fake Papers, I thought that it was a series of short accounts. It is not. Rockett alternates between eras, the…

Review of Fake Papers by Aaron Rockett

July 6, 2019