Category: history
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I had thought that learning about L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology in Going Clear by Lawrence Wright would have been the kookiest and nuttiest thing I’d ever read regarding religion and cults. Charles Manson is definitely another very weird chapter in American history, but I feel that both can’t really compare to the story of the…
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If there was one defining moment I had to pick that captured the golden days of sports television entertainment, it undoubtedly would have been the rise of WCW and the nWo. You just had to be there and witness it as it unfolded in real time to truly understand and appreciate the genius of it…
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As someone who is not familiar with the JFK assassination that happened in the early 1960s, The Housewives Underground by Kaitlyn Tiffany is surprisingly a very good start and not for what you’d first expect. After more than six decades, there are a lot of books on this subject and I’m sure each of them…
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How can any of this story be true? And yet, it is. The story of Virginia Hall likely goes down as one of the most incredible stories of a woman from the World War II era that I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading about. Not only did her actions help save countless lives during…
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The fifth book in the Matthew Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom, and it’s one of the best so far. It is likely one of the longest books in the series so far, if memory serves me correctly. In truly spectacular fashion, the author seems to have drawn me into Tudor London yet again. I believe…
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I’ve read a couple of investigative journalism novels by Erik Larson, and they were mostly enjoyable. The Devil in the White City, while still enjoyable, warrants a strong caution for any readers thinking this will be yet another typical true crime thriller in which either the hunt for or the life of the criminal dominates…
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Let’s face it. Not many journalists can do what the author of this book did. To investigate a story and crime in the past, regardless of how infamous it is, for nearly twenty years is quite an achievement. The amount of frustration due to roadblocks and threats would likely make all but the most seasoned…
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Here in the fourth book of the series, I find myself continuing to enjoy the Matthew Shardlake series. With Revelation, author CJ Sansom has crafted another historical fiction mystery novel that kept me reading nonstop. And yes, there was a lot of reading to be done, with the book clocking in at almost 600 pages.…
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Books like All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer are considered essential reads at the beginning of 2026. With the United States having attacked Iran, it is especially important to have some understanding of the history between these two countries and how that relationship has soured since the 1980s and earlier. To my surprise, All…
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Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer talks about the brutal killing of an innocent woman and her baby daughter in the mid-1980s by two brothers whom one of them believed that doing so was doing God’s work. It’s the story about how Mormonism and equally important, how the different sects were created, especially…
The Mindless Catalog 