January 17, 2023
Tom Gormley’s Inferno! And the Miracles of the Colorado Marshall Fire recaps the devastation wrought by the massive December 30, 2021 fire that swept through Boulder County, Colorado. “In a little over four hours,” writes Gormley, the Marshall Fire, “fueled by high velocity Chinook winds, burned 6,026 acres, consumed 1,084 structures and damaged many more.”
[…]
December 13, 2022
John R. Sharp’s casual, chatty style and contagious appreciation for hieroglyphs —“perfectly proportioned, highly detailed miniature works of art” — makes his field guide enticing to read cover to cover, rather than consulted only occasionally, as with most guides.
Cartouches, Sharp explains, are the names of ancient Egyptian royalty “inscribed in oval frames on… stone.” […]
November 28, 2022
A ringing 21-gun salute to the heyday of sailing ships, Brian Stafford’s narrative history, The Great Windships: How Sailing Ships Made the Modern World, displays an old-fashioned relish for the daring of nautical adventurers and innovators of yore.
The book begins by carefully defining relevant terminology, explaining how a sailing ship is built, with its […]
October 17, 2022
Examining Haiti’s unique past and troubled present, Fritznel D. Octave takes a proud but concerned look at his native land, proposing a way past the country’s poverty and civil strife.
The author begins by proposing a different way of seeing Haiti. While acknowledging its many problems, he bemoans an image of Haiti as a perpetual […]
October 10, 2022
In this astute volume, former Belgian diplomat Philippe Guillaume provides a sweeping overview of the influence of religion on the development of the European Union.
Starting with a summary of pre-Christian times, the author makes a strong argument for how Jesus’ followers helped build on the Roman ideals of freedom, equality, and reverence for a […]
September 5, 2022
Coming from most people, the statement “The story of my family is in many respects the story of America” would sound more than a little presumptuous. However, it isn’t far from the truth for Scott MacDonald, as he proves in this genealogical survey.
Initially knowing little, MacDonald began seriously researching his family tree over a […]
August 1, 2022
With this short but illuminating biographical study, Charles L. Ladner argues convincingly for a lesser-known early scientist’s place among the Scientific Revolution’s leading lights.
Ladner acknowledges that his subject, Elizabethan astronomer and mathematician Thomas Digges, isn’t exactly a household name. Nonetheless, Digges could boast of an impressive list of accomplishments. As Copernicus’s first English translator, […]
July 19, 2022
Part memoir and part history, Wu Sing-Yung’s Father’s Gold Secret details how the author’s father, General Samuel Song-qing Wu, managed the finances for Free China’s Nationalist Army during the war between Mao’s communist China and the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-Shek.
In particular, the book describes how Wu, who was Chief of Finance in […]
May 23, 2022
While some are familiar with the space race from the perspective of U.S. involvement, many may not have compared what was happening simultaneously in Soviet advancement. Walter Sierra does just that in volume two of his “Beyond the Saga of Rocket Science” series subtitled Avoiding Armageddon.
Sierra pulls back the Iron Curtain to look at […]
April 18, 2022
In Letters from Vietnam, Dennis Hoy describes his life as a U.S. infantryman during the Vietnam War.
Twenty-four-year-old Hoy married Beth, his college girlfriend at Eastern New Mexico University, two months before he left for basic training after being drafted. Once separated, the newlyweds wrote to each other frequently. Hoy bases his memoir on these […]