There are numerous books written mostly by officers of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia, but this one, told by an NCO of the Imperial Guard, is, in my opinion, one of the very best.  Sergeant Bourgogne had campaigned with Napoleon for several years and he describes the retreat from Moscow in terms which are not sensational but rather in terms which brings the reader into the very action of which he writes.  You can feel his hunger and his cold, the pain he feels for comrades left behind and the joy as others long thought of as dead, are found.

These two novels finish the trilogy by Margaret George (The Autobiography of Henry VIII was previously reviewed).  Of the two novels, Mary Queen of Scotland has the more complex character development, and while Elizabeth is good, it seems Ms. George must have been worn out by the time she got to the last book in the trilogy.

Neill Ferguson, one of todays top historians and social observers pulled together several noted historians (John Adamson, J.C.D. Clark, etc.) to create alternative views of history.  Unlike most counterfactuals, each section requires the reader to have a better than average understanding of the period being discussed.  The first time I read this book I knew that I would have to read it three of four times to really grasp some of its arguments. 

Andrei Vyshinsky rose to fame as the chief prosecutor during many of the infamous show trials of the late 1930’s in the Soviet Union.  A brilliant student, lawyer and lover of academia, he was a second level (never entering Stalin’s inner circle) bureaucrat who managed to use the deaths of those he prosecuted to advance his career.  Although the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, Joseph E. Davies felt that the trials were conducted to the highest legal standards (his book, Mission to Moscow was made into a terrible propaganda movie in 1943) they could only be viewed in that manner if you wondered why defendants who recanted were taken from the court room and then their written statements reversing their recanted statements were admitted and they were convicted (many who recanted were so badly beaten that they could not be taken into the public eye and were quickly executed).  As a side note, Ambassador Davies spent most his time antique hunting and sent hundreds of “finds” back to his home in the U.S.

One of the author’s previous books, Wages of Destruction previously reviewed, was an outstanding look at the financial world of the Third Reich and how Hitler’s world view and understanding of the strength of the U.S. economy impacted on his decision regarding going to war.  In this massive (almost 700 page) work, the author looks at an even more complex problem, the financial crash of 2007-8 and the later one in Europe.  As one can imagine, this is not a light work, the excellent descriptions of many of the financial vehicles invented by the banks and regulators can be mind numbing.  Not a book to be read lightly, to grasp the complexity of what is written would require a flow chart that would make the invasion of Normandy look like a plaything.  It is because of this complexity that no one at any level could understand, regulate or formulate a strategy to contain the forces that had been let lose several years before the crash. It is in this area that this book fails for while being critical of the banks (worldwide) and fawning over President Obama, he manages to cover in a couple of sentences the role of the politicians (especially President Clinton) and the authors favorite financial advisors (Rubin and Summers) for their roles in passing the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the easy housing policies of HUD and Andrew Cuomo which led to the housing bubble.

At over seven hundred pages, I approached this book with a certain degree of trepidation; am I really that interested in Hamilton and what about his life could hold my interest.  Within a few pages, Chernow snagged me by bringing a man I knew little of into my life and presenting an exciting brilliant personality that fundamentally changed the course of history.

For decades, Robert Conquest, before his death was considered the premier expert on the rise of the Soviet Union.  His research was often criticized by those on the left but with the opening of the Soviet archives, his excellence was proven beyond a doubt.  In this book, he lays out what may be the greatest genocide in the world’s history, that of the Ukrainians especially during the years of 1929-1933.  During that time, as many fourteen million people were executed or starved to death in a deliberate policy designed to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism and the will of the peasants to resist Soviet power. 

Following decades of Civil War which costs Rome hundreds of thousands of dead, the rise of a 19-year old adopted son of Julius Caesar seemed improbable.  Aligned against him were the murders of Caesar and strongman Mark Anthony, all veterans of the wars, savvy politicians and holders of immense wealth and prestige.  How could a sickly, inexperienced youth hope to compete let alone survive against the forces aligned against him?  The strongest hand he had to play was that Julius Caesar had chosen that boy to inherit his mantle, his wealth, his name.

According to Marxist “scientific thought”, man is shaped by his environment; change the environment and you can create a “New Man”.  The same belief applies to plants and animals.  Thus, it was that while the Soviet Union spent more on scientific research than any other nation, they also managed to produce some of the worse examples of what we would call “junk science”.