“The subsequent failures in Iraq shouldn’t take away from what American troops accomplished during what may well be the biggest comeback ever in a guerrilla war….Mansoor provides the definitive account of how it was accomplished…Mansoor is superbly positioned to tell the story, not only because of his academic training but
“Write as often as you can. I long for letters now.” —Private Peter McGregor In 1989, historian Anthony Fletcher found an old tin trunk among his grandmother’s possessions. In it were 243 letters, sent by his grandfather Major Reggie Trench to his wife Clare during World War I. They lay
As the world became embroiled in the fight against the Nazis, America gathered to decide on the president who would lead them through it. Susan Dunn’s book, 1940: FDR, Wilkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election amid the Storm, documents this incredible moment in history when the US broke with tradition and elected
While a staple in modern-day statistics classes, Bayes’ rule, as immortalized in our statistics textbooks, has been killed and revived several times. Although public opinion on this theory has waxed and waned dramatically, was Bayes’ rule ever fully dismissed? Sharon Bertsch McGrayne in her book, The Theory That Would Not Die:
Follow @yaleARTbooks In the century and a half since the Civil War, more than 75,000 books have been published about the war and its legacy. The figure speaks to the magnitude of its impact on American politics, economics, and culture. However, few of these books have examined how American art
John France— Not long after the Second World War during which I was born, in about 1947 or 48, I startled my assembled family by saying that I wished the war was still on. The cries of shock which this evoked overwhelmed me, and I persisted no further with this
Ivan Lett— Despite recent posts, I am not inclined to change the title of this column to “War!”, as one e-mail suggestion read…. If I seem stuck on the topic of recent books on World War II, it is primarily because: Other WWII books I’ve read never consider a Germanic
Ivan Lett— Continuing my reading on World War II, it’s almost a needless point to make that December 7 was arguably the turning point of conflict. The morning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has been recreated and dramatized many times over as one of the most identifiable moments
Ivan Lett— It has been observed many times, many ways, how late the United States entered World War II, much to the chagrin of its European friends fighting the Axis Powers. My favorite recap comes from Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill, where he imitates the arrival of a US cavalryman,
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, few people in America had heard of the Taliban. And in 2000, when Ahmed Rashid wrote the bestselling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, based on his experiences as a journalist covering the civil war in Afghanistan for twenty years,