Crown & Sceptre is generally amusing and it has the instructional benefit of helping readers keep the Williams, Henrys, Edwards, and Georges who have occupied the ancient throne straight.
Thomas Filbin
Book Review: “Jena 1800” — A Ferocious Hunger for Freedom
Peter Neumann has written a compelling historical study that focuses on the tumultuous concatenation of a number of imaginative and dynamic thinkers.
Book Review: “The Anomaly” — We Know Less Than We Think
The Anomaly is an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves.
Book Review: “Magnetism” — Attraction and Repulsion, the Endless Puzzle
Writer Jacqueline Gay Walley has become adept at probing the unpredictable interaction of self and others, transformations that imprison as well as liberate.
Book Review: “The Anglo-Saxons” — An Era of Continual Turmoil and Buried Treasures
Medievalist Marc Morris has written an engaging account of turbulent times in a suitable and interesting style.
Book Review: The Threat of Thought — The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
The pathway to tyranny is paved by encouraging people to believe in the uselessness of science, logic, and expertise.
Book Review: “I Belong to Vienna” — The Merit of Not Doing the Wrong Thing
The value and virtue of I Belong to Vienna is that it personalizes and humanizes a global reign of terror into an understandable drama.
Book Review: “Animalia” — ‘Taint a Fit World for Man or Beast
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo has written a marvelous novel in the naturalistic mode that explores how the lives of humans and animals are both interdependent and in conflict — it is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.
Book Review: “De Gaulle” — An Exemplary View of the Man and His Times
For anyone interested in the man or that era, De Gaulle is indispensable.
Book Review: “A History of France” — Outsized Heroes on Horseback
In all of his books, John Julius Norwich remembered that history is a story.