Fighting Cousins

by | Oct 25, 2015

Yanks and Limeys: Alliance Warfare in the Second World War. by Niall Barr. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015. Hardcover, 548 pages, $30. Reviewed by John P. Rossi It is generally agreed that World War II was a victory of Russian numbers and American industrial output. True...

Re-introducing Japan’s Conservatives

by | Sep 13, 2015

Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship with the West by Hirakawa Sukehiro. Global Oriental (Kent, UK), 2005. Hardcover, 400 pages, $90. Conservatives are often portrayed as an insular lot. Blinded by tradition and preternaturally bigoted in constitution, so goes the standard...

Complicating the Nixon Story

by | Aug 31, 2015

The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961 by Irwin F. Gellman. Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 791 pages, $40.The historical demonization of Richard Nixon usually proceeds from his supposedly red-baiting campaigns for the House and...

A Certain Cold Grandeur

by | Aug 2, 2015

On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith. Random House, 2014. Hardcover, 842 pages, $38.Looking back during his final years, Nelson Rockefeller declared his life a failure in that he had not become president of the United States. He had...

Churchill Defends the Gallipoli Campaign

by | Jun 29, 2015

Winston Churchill reportedly once remarked that history would treat him kindly because he intended to write it. Churchill’s efforts to do so failed with respect to the Gallipoli Campaign—the allied attempt during the First World War to force the Dardanelles Strait,...