The 2005 biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday opened many Westerns eyes to the real Mao; the Mandarin who was carried on a litter during the Long March, the debauched lecher who surrounded himself with young girls and the man who drew inspiration from the worse Emperors who wasted the lives of millions. This book by the personal physician of Mao, adds more information to the man behind the posters; the master politician who could wait years for his revenge, the man who believed his own propaganda.

A treasure of a book!  If you are interested in interesting behind the scenes stories about Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V, this gem will make your day.  Sir Ponsonby’s family had served in the inner Court for generations and had provided the Empire with diplomats and successful generals.  This Ponsonby served behind the scenes ending up as not only the private secretary to King George V, but also in charge of his personal finances.

In 1963 the Democrats faced a crisis as great as Watergate, but they were saved by the assignation of President Kennedy.  Bobby Baker, the “child of the Senate” was under investigation for bribery, fraud, and numerous other felonies.  The investigation ended when Lyndon Johnson became President as the nation was focused on the new President and his determination to make his mark on the Presidency.

How do you write the history of a political movement which killed between 100,000,000 and 150,000,000 men, women, and children? You gather some of the best historians in Europe under the direction of the Director of Research for the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris and have them examine the archives in the former Soviet Bloc to reveal the crimes committed by generations of those who felt they could change human nature.  Instead, they tortured, murdered, deported, starved, and exploited the hundreds of millions under their control.

Canada, the land of happiness, a land where its citizens are liked worldwide and a land where the government on the side of every citizen.  Except if you are an investor.

When the introduction of a book describes the author as “nearly as good a specimen as ever worshiped Mars”, you know you are in for a book which not only describes the day to day life in the trenches of World War I, but also a perspective from a warrior who went on to symbolize the ideal for the inter-war philosophy of the “heroic struggle” which so motivated many of the youth of Germany after the war and led to the rise of Nazism.

For nearly eighty years, Dreiser’s novel, written in 1900, was only available in a basically censored version.  The Pennsylvania Edition goes back to his original manuscript and presents this tale of a young woman, on her own, and the two men who love her as the author intended.  Why was this American classic not published in its original form? Because Dreiser’s wife and his friend Arthur Henry, along with the publisher, felt it was filled with too much sex and was too dark.  With that in mind, the reader of this version must remember that the novel was written in 1900 and given our norms of today, seeking the lurid sexuality which was censored (by the author at the instance of the publisher, his wife and friend) will be hard pressed to find anything to stimulate the senses.

This excellent novel will give the reader an excellent idea of Chicago in 1900; a time of rapid growth and opportunity, when job seekers with no skills could find work which would give them some skills, when many of those same workers could be exploited by their employers and a time of a strict moral code.  In this time, two men love a young woman who gradually learns the ways of the world.  One of the men will leave and survive, the other will be destroyed.  In effect, this is the American version of a novel by Balzac or Zola who so outraged the staid establishment of their time.  Even though the United States has a First Amendment and did not have a national censor as in France, given the time, the novel in its original form would have created a major furor.

The characters are well developed, and one can sense the emotions as they progress through the novel.  I first read this novel forty years ago and probably once a decade, I re-read it, picking up more from each reading.  It is though, a melancholy book and the reader should be prepared at the end, to set the novel aside and put one’s emotions back in order.  You will also find that the human condition has not changed very much over the past one hundred plus years.

There was a time when the question of the future of Jews in Europe did not depend on government sanctions, actions or anti-Semitism.  The real question was if within a few generations the Hebrew race and religion would simply die out through a low birth rate and assimilation.  As terrible as it is to believe, the Final Solution of Hitler and the Third Reich led to a rebirth of the Jews as they were able for the first time in 2,000 years to have and create, after WWII, a state of their own. 

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X.  Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X…What I want to do is to look up C.  I want to show you what manner of man he is.  I call him the Forgotten Man.  Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.  The is the man who never is thought of… He works, he votes, generally he pays-but he always pays…  William Graham Sumner, Yale University, 1883

Perhaps no Civil War General is surrounded by more controversy than Nathan Bedford Forrest and yet his life and campaigns are to a large extent ignored or lightly skipped over as they are lost in the large battles of that conflict. This book, written by a man of the South, is pro-Forrest and yet, it is difficult to refute most of the history as told when reviewed against other contemporary and non-contemporary accounts.