What? Another book about Donald Trump? I’ve already reviewed nearly two dozen of them. So, what could possibly move me to read another one? Well, three things, as it turns out. First, author Mark Leibovich is one of the funniest observers of American politics I’ve come across in recent years…

Amazon lists 4,000 books about the Holocaust. Half are nonfiction, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. The rest include such bestselling novels as The Book Thief and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Of course, some of the innumerable memoirs and novels relate the…

History can deceive us. When we read about the major events of the past, they appear inevitable with all the black-and-white certainty of words on a page. And that’s certainly true about D-Day. The Allies had assembled such overwhelming force in June 1944 that it may seem they couldn’t possibly…

Sometime late in the 1980s, I was speaking with the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. The conversation turned to the stock market and how poor a guide it was to the country’s economic health. He pointed to General Electric and its CEO, Jack Welch. The company had consistently…

With a population of 1.38 billion and the fifth largest economy in the world, India is a giant among nations. Yet a single family has played an outsize role in building the economic engine that makes India what it is today. In no other large nation has any family loomed…

Today, Northeim is a railroad town of some 29,000 people in northern Germany. But only about 10,000 called it home in 1930, when the Nazi Party began its explosive rise to dominance throughout the country. Historian William Sheridan Allen chose the town for his study at the local level of…

Ever since the close of World War II eight decades ago, stories have been surfacing about heroic men and women who saved Jews from certain death in the Holocaust at great risk to their own lives. Names such as Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200, and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved several…

Few of us in the 21st century think much about the medieval era. Nor are we likely to believe that life in that time bears any meaningful relationship to the world around us today. Yet that would be a mistake. Much of what we take for granted traces its origins…

When we consider the fate of the Jews in Europe during the Nazi years, our thoughts tend to drift toward stereotypical images. The gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps. And doomed Anne Frank cooped up in hiding for two years until she was betrayed. Both images are accurate…