Twelve Windows into History: A Year of Reading History Books in 2025

 

In 2025, twelve of the fifty books I read were histories. Together they spanned continents, centuries, ideologies, and genres. Some were sweeping narratives of empires and revolutions, others intimate studies of lives, cities, and ideas. The authors ranged from Renaissance philosophers to contemporary journalists. Looking back on this collection now, I’m struck by both its variety and a quiet cohesion: these books are not just about the past, but about how societies contend with power, trauma, and the contested meanings of freedom.

Power and Its Discontents

John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics serves as a perfect starting point. It’s a clear-eyed survey of the evolution of economic thought and the ideological clashes that surround capitalism. Cassidy isn’t polemical; he’s analytical, tracing how thinkers from Keynes to Hayek shaped (and responded to) the 20th-century world. His book provides essential context for understanding how capitalist democracies weather crises, and how criticism from both the left and the right forms an inevitable—sometimes healthy—part of the system.

Cassidy’s exploration finds a natural companion in Civilization and Colossus, both by Niall Ferguson. In Civilization, Ferguson argues that the West’s dominance was no accident: it emerged from what he calls “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Colossus extends the conversation to American power specifically, casting the U.S. as an “empire in denial”—reluctant to assume the burdens of imperial responsibility, yet deeply embedded in global dominance. Taken together, Ferguson’s books present a provocative, often contrarian account of empire and modernization.

This theme—how power is structured, sustained, and eventually strained—runs through many of the books I read. Winston Churchill’s The Great Democracies, the final volume in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, revisits the rise of Britain and America with an unmistakable mid-20th-century tone of civilizational pride. Though his prose is magisterial, the world he writes about—the Anglo-American ascension—is already under siege by the time he sets his pen down.

War, Destruction, and the Edge of Civilization

Where Churchill evokes the glory of democratic power, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction is a quiet but devastating meditation on the moral toll of war. Focused on the Allied bombings of German cities during World War II, Sebald probes the silence in postwar German literature about civilian suffering. His prose, full of melancholic restraint, contrasts sharply with Ferguson’s triumphalism or Churchill’s rhetorical grandeur. If Ferguson describes the machinery of empire, Sebald offers a view from the ruins.

Sebastian Junger’s War and A Death in Belmont continue this investigation into conflict, though from very different vantage points. War is immersive and immediate—a journalistic account of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings of the post-9/11 era. Junger, embedded with the troops, captures not only combat but the paradoxical camaraderie that war breeds. In A Death in Belmont, he shifts to the domestic front, using a murder case from the 1960s to explore race, violence, and the lingering legacy of fear during the Boston Strangler era. The unspoken thread linking these two books is trauma—how it is felt, interpreted, and often mythologized.

William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid is another account of war—this time from the shadows. The biography of William Stephenson, the Canadian spymaster who ran British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere during WWII, reads like a spy thriller. But it also documents how information, disinformation, and covert alliances shaped the outcome of global war. It’s hard to read this without seeing the roots of today’s surveillance state.

Democracy, Dissent, and Collapse

Two books on this list—Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy—couldn’t be more different in tone, yet both are preoccupied with the fragility of republics. Murray critiques contemporary Western democracies for what he sees as cultural self-sabotage. His essays burn with polemical urgency, questioning whether liberal societies can survive their own internal contradictions. Machiavelli, writing five centuries earlier, is colder, more analytical. His Discourses praise the Roman Republic for its civic virtues, while warning that corruption, inertia, and factionalism inevitably bring down even the best regimes.

If Machiavelli diagnoses decline as a structural reality, Murray sees it as a moral collapse. Together, they ask hard questions about whether democracy is a stable end state or a fragile experiment that must be constantly renewed—and defended.

Lives in Context: Biography and Human Resilience

Several books focus less on systems and more on individuals. Dava Sobel’s The Elements of Marie Curie offers a lucid, engaging portrait of the pioneering scientist. What makes this book memorable isn’t just the science—it’s the clarity with which Sobel evokes Curie’s grit, intelligence, and solitude. In a world dominated by male institutions and fragile egos, Curie carved out a space not only to survive, but to transform science itself.

Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness is similarly intimate, though more philosophical. Drawing on American legal and political history, Rosen traces how the idea of “happiness” evolved from classical virtue to individual fulfillment. His book acts as a bridge between past and present, asking how the Founders’ conception of liberty and purpose translates into modern life.

Finally, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem and Titans of History offer sweeping panoramas of world history. Jerusalem is particularly compelling—a biography of a city that has witnessed more religious passion, conquest, and tragedy than perhaps any other. Montefiore manages to narrate this without reducing it to caricature. In Titans of History, he zooms out even further, offering biographical sketches of major historical figures from Hammurabi to Mandela. While more breezy and episodic, it reminds the reader that history is always the product of human choices—often flawed, sometimes visionary.

A Common Thread: Civilization Under Pressure

So what ties these twelve books together? At first glance, they range widely in subject and style. But read as a group, they seem to revolve around a core tension: how civilizations are built, how they are sustained, and how they fracture—through war, ideology, apathy, or internal contradiction.

Whether the topic is Machiavelli’s Ancient Rome, Churchill’s Britain, Sebald’s Germany, or Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the recurring question is this: how do societies balance power with principle, stability with freedom, and tradition with change? These books don’t offer easy answers. Some, like Ferguson or Murray, offer prescriptive warnings. Others, like Sebald or Junger, linger in the ambiguity and pain of aftermath.

Yet taken together, they offer something else: perspective. They show that history isn’t a neat progression or a morality tale. It’s a living, breathing record of decisions made under pressure. And reading these works in 2025—a time of rising authoritarianism, cultural anxiety, and digital fragmentation—I was reminded that history’s greatest lesson may be its refusal to simplify.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: A Great and Complex Founder of America

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is one of those rare biographies that does two things at once: it resurrects a historical figure in full human complexity, and it makes a persuasive case that this figure mattered more than most readers were ever taught. Hamilton emerges not merely as a Founding Father, but as the engine of the early American republic—brilliant, abrasive, indispensable, and ultimately self-destructive.

Chernow begins with Hamilton’s astonishing rise from obscurity. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, orphaned young, and educated through sheer force of talent, Hamilton arrives in North America already sharpened by hardship. Chernow is unsparing here—Hamilton’s hunger for order, status, and permanence is rooted in chaos. This psychological grounding matters, because it explains everything that follows. Hamilton’s obsession with structure, credit, and authority was not abstract theory; it was survival instinct elevated into national policy.

Hamilton’s Revolutionary War service is one of the book’s great strengths. As aide-de-camp to George Washington, Hamilton becomes indispensable—drafting correspondence, managing logistics, and acting as Washington’s intellectual lieutenant. Chernow makes clear that Washington recognized Hamilton’s genius early and trusted him deeply, even when he found him exasperating. The relationship is portrayed as mutually formative: Washington gave Hamilton legitimacy and restraint; Hamilton gave Washington a mind capable of thinking several steps ahead. Without Hamilton, Washington’s presidency would have been weaker. Without Washington, Hamilton would likely have burned himself out even faster.

The heart of the book—and the reason it has had such a long cultural afterlife—is Chernow’s treatment of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. Here, Hamilton is not just a theorist but a relentless operator. His financial program—assumption of state debts, establishment of public credit, the Bank of the United States—was radical, controversial, and foundational. Chernow argues convincingly that Hamilton understood something his rivals did not: nations survive on confidence, not purity. Jefferson wanted a virtuous agrarian republic; Hamilton wanted a functioning one. History has largely sided with Hamilton, and Chernow does not pretend otherwise.

But this is not hagiography. Chernow is clear-eyed about Hamilton’s flaws, especially his inability to stop fighting. The political infighting with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is presented as both ideological and personal. Hamilton’s pen was lethal, and he used it constantly. He could not resist humiliating opponents or escalating conflicts, even when discretion would have served him better. His feud with John Adams is particularly telling: Hamilton undermined a president from his own party out of intellectual contempt and strategic impatience, a move that all but guaranteed his political isolation.

The most devastating section of the book is Hamilton’s self-immolation in the Reynolds affair. Chernow treats this episode not as a scandal for its own sake but as a study in catastrophic judgment. Hamilton, obsessed with his reputation for probity, chose public confession over political survival. The result was moral clarity paired with total ruin. It is one of the strangest episodes in American political history, and Chernow narrates it with restraint and disbelief in equal measure.

The book’s final act—the rivalry with Aaron Burr and the fatal duel—is tragic precisely because it feels avoidable. Chernow resists easy moralizing. Burr is not a cartoon villain, and Hamilton is not a martyr. Instead, Chernow shows two men trapped by honor culture, pride, and accumulated grievance. Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot, so to speak, reads less like noble sacrifice and more like exhaustion. He had been fighting all his life; the fight finally killed him.

What makes Chernow’s biography exceptional is its balance. Hamilton is neither sanitized nor dismissed. He is brilliant and reckless, visionary and intolerable. Chernow’s prose is clear, propulsive, and confident without being flashy. At nearly 800 pages, the book earns its length; there is very little padding. Every feud, memo, and policy debate builds toward a coherent portrait of a man who helped create the United States and then made himself impossible within it.

If there is a final judgment here, it is this: Hamilton was the Founder most attuned to modernity, and therefore the least comfortable in his own time. Chernow makes that case decisively. You finish the book convinced not only that Hamilton mattered, but that the country still runs—financially, bureaucratically, institutionally—on tracks he laid down. Loving this book is not surprising. It is serious history written with narrative force, and it leaves you thinking hard about power, ambition, and the costs of being right too soon.

In this year the nation Hamilton helped to found celebrates 250 years since The Declaration of Independence was published on July 4, 1776. I recently re-read On Revolution by Hannah Arendt in which she describes why most revolutions aspire to freedom and end in tyranny. Central to the book is her explanation of why the American Revolution succeeded when nearly all others failed. 

Will America continue into a more perfect union or after a quarter-millennium fall into the tyranny that is the fate of every other revolution?  This year 2026 will say a lot about America.

  

Breath by James Nestor: We All Breathe Badly!!

As a book, Breath works because it sneaks physiology in through storytelling. Nestor uses explorers, monks, athletes, dentists, and oddball experiments to make one simple point: "how we breathe now is not how humans evolved to breathe — and it’s costing us health." He sometimes leans too hard on anecdote, but he never loses sight of the central truth: breathing is a trainable biological system, not an automatic afterthought.

What makes the book especially effective is that it doesn’t treat breathing as wellness fluff. It ties breath to:

* facial structure and crooked teeth

* sleep apnea and snoring

* anxiety and panic

* endurance and recovery

* inflammation and nitric oxide

That’s a surprisingly wide map for something most people do 20,000 times a day without thinking.

Where Nestor is strongest is in showing that "over-breathing" — fast, shallow, mouth-based breathing — is now the default in industrial societies, and that this alone can drive fatigue, nervousness, poor sleep, and reduced oxygen delivery. You don’t need to buy every historical claim he makes to see that the modern chest-breathing, mouth-open pattern is maladaptive.

The practical side of the book is what gives it staying power. You can read it as a story, but you walk away with concrete, testable habits: nasal breathing, slower exhalations, tolerance of mild air hunger, and attention to nighttime breathing. None of that is mystical. It’s nervous-system regulation and gas chemistry.

Breath doesn’t promise immortality. It promises something more believable: that "if you stop fighting your own respiratory system, a lot of things quietly get better." That’s a rare combination of entertainment and usefulness. Nestor made something most of us never think about — breathing — feel like a lost technology.

It’s not a medical textbook. It’s part history, part journalism, part self-experiment. Some of its claims get overstated, but the "core" is solid: how you breathe affects your nervous system, sleep, blood pressure, endurance, anxiety, and even how your face and jaw develop.

And most modern people breathe badly.

What he gets right:

1. Nasal breathing matters

Breathing through your nose:

* warms and filters air

* produces nitric oxide (which improves oxygen uptake)

* keeps airways open

* reduces snoring and apnea

Mouth breathing, especially at night, is linked to:

* poor sleep

* dry mouth and cavities

* higher blood pressure

* anxiety

* worse endurance

If you do "one" thing from that book, it should be: sleep with your mouth closed.

That’s why he pushes mouth tape — weird but effective.  I use it now.

2. Slow breathing calms your nervous system

Long exhales activate the vagus nerve. That shifts your body from “fight or flight” into “rest and repair.” It’s not mystical — it’s physiology.

A simple rule:

* Inhale ~4 seconds

* Exhale ~6–8 seconds

Do that for 5 minutes and your heart rate, cortisol, and blood pressure drop. 

3. Overbreathing is the modern disease

Most of us breathe too much, too fast, and too shallow. That:

* lowers CO₂

* reduces oxygen delivery to tissues

* increases anxiety and fatigue

The irony: breathing less makes you feel better.

That’s why techniques like Buteyko and “box breathing” work.

4. CO₂ tolerance = endurance and calm

Your urge to breathe is driven by CO₂, not oxygen. Training yourself to tolerate higher CO₂:

* improves athletic performance

* reduces panic

* increases breath efficiency

Simple test: how long you can hold your breath after a normal exhale. Under 20 seconds = poor. Over 40 = very good.

5. You don’t need all the crazy stuff

Some of the book’s “ancient breathing secrets” are romanticized. You don’t need Tibetan monks or Wim Hof ice baths to get the benefit.

Good things:

* nasal breathing

* slower breathing

* deeper diaphragm movement

* better sleep breathing

Breath  is a fun read with a lot of good information.

Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The Book That Explains Why Revolutions Keep Failing

 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution is the book people come to later, after reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. On Revolution explains why modern political movements, even well-intentioned ones, so often collapse into chaos, violence, or empty spectacle. Why nearly all revolutions begin with a cry for freedom and end under tyranny. Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has called On Revolution Arendt’s most important work for our time. 

I didn't read On Revolution to learn about 18th-century history, but that aspect fascinated me the most from my first (of three) readings. I read the book to understand why most revolutions fail. Why do today's movements and “moments” of rising against tyranny today feel simultaneously urgent and powerless—why they generate outrage and mobilization but fail to produce lasting freedom.

Arendt’s central claim: "most modern revolutions confuse liberation with freedom, and the confusion destroys them."

Liberation is not freedom

Liberation means being freed from something—tyranny, poverty, occupation, oppression. Freedom, in Arendt’s sense, means the ability to "act politically with others in a durable public space." It means founding something that lasts: institutions, laws, assemblies, and a shared world where people appear to one another as equals.

The American Revolution, she argues, succeeded because it understood this difference. The French Revolution (and the Russian Revolution) failed because it didn’t.

The American founders, to their eternal credit and our benefit, were obsessed with founding.  They fought to write constitutions and found legislatures, courts, and lasting programs. They worried less about the social questions such poverty, hunger, and inequality and more about how to build a political structure that could outlast them. They created a space for citizens to act together across generations.

The French revolutionaries, by contrast, became consumed by suffering. Once “the people” were redefined as the hungry masses, politics was no longer about public freedom—it became a moral crusade to eliminate misery. And misery, Arendt insists, has no natural limit. Once the revolution defines itself by alleviating suffering, it must keep escalating, because suffering is endless. That is how revolutions devour themselves.

In Arendt’s formulation, compassion is a terrible political guide.

Not because suffering isn’t real—but because it can’t be organized into stable institutions. You can relieve hunger. You cannot found freedom on pity.

Why revolutions radicalize

This is where On Revolution becomes eerily contemporary.

Arendt shows how revolutions tend to slide from political action into moral absolutism. Once a movement defines itself as the voice of “the people,” anyone who disagrees becomes an enemy of humanity itself. Violence becomes justified. Due process evaporates. The revolution must keep purifying itself to remain “true.”

That logic did not die in 1794. It is alive in every movement that substitutes "moral righteousness for political construction."

Arendt is not saying people shouldn’t care about injustice. She is saying that "you cannot build a republic out of rage, resentment, or suffering alone." Those are forces of destruction, not creation.

What the American founders understood—better than almost anyone before or since—is that politics is not primarily about justice in the abstract. It is about "creating a space where people can argue, act, compromise, and govern themselves without killing each other."

That space is fragile. It must be designed, protected, and institutionalized. Once it disappears, no amount of moral fervor can replace it.

The lost tradition of councils

One of the most fascinating parts of On Revolution is Arendt’s recovery of what she calls the “council tradition.” In almost every major revolution—American town halls, French sections, Russian soviets, Hungarian workers’ councils—ordinary people spontaneously create local bodies to govern themselves. These are moments of genuine political freedom: people speaking, voting, deliberating, acting together.

And then, almost without fail, (except in America) these councils are crushed—by parties, bureaucracies, or charismatic leaders.

Why? Because councils represent horizontal power, while modern politics is obsessed with vertical power: seizing the state, controlling the apparatus, winning elections, commanding the police and military. The councils threaten elites of every ideology because they distribute power too widely.

Arendt believed the greatest tragedy of modern revolutions is not that they fail—it’s that they destroy their own most democratic institutions in the process of “winning.”

That insight alone makes On Revolution worth reading in the 21st century.

Why Berkowitz is right

When Berkowitz calls this Arendt’s most important book for our time, he is pointing to something uncomfortable: we live in an age of permanent political agitation with very little political creation.

Everywhere you look, people are mobilized. Very few are building.  Social media creates movements without institutions. Outrage without constitutions. Protests without durable structures. Everyone feels morally outraged; almost no one is founding anything that can last.

Arendt would recognize this instantly. She would say we are drowning in liberation movements that cannot produce freedom. We are very good at tearing down. We are terrible at building a shared world.

On Revolution is not a book you read once and “get.” It is deeply critical of the modern left and deeply skeptical of the modern right. It admires the American founding while being merciless about its blind spots. It honors revolutionary courage while condemning revolutionary excess. And it is written with Arendt’s characteristic clarity: sentences that are lucid and full of insight, but often complex. 

[An aside:  I shared my enthusiasm for Arendt with a friend who is an Arendt skeptic.  There are a lot of Arendt critics who dislike her conclusions in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I had the book with me when we met for coffee. My friend opened the book randomly to the opening sentence of chapter 3, read it aloud and said, "What does that mean." It was 82 words with three dependent clauses. I stammered "I'll get back to you."]

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The hardest thing On Revolution asks us to accept is this: Freedom is boring.

Not in lived experience—but in structure. Freedom requires procedures, rules, institutions, compromise, and limits. It requires people to lose elections and accept it. It requires citizens to live with people they dislike. It requires slow, frustrating, incremental change. It requires grace. And as Arendt says explicitly, it requires forgiveness. 

Revolutionary passion, by contrast, feels alive. It feels pure. It feels righteous. And it burns itself out.

Arendt understood that if you want a society where people can keep acting together, you must give up the dream of moral perfection. You must choose a flawed, procedural, human republic over the intoxicating fantasy of total justice. That's why the woke left felt so wrong with its on line banishing of people. When the Trump right silences critics with death threats they are no better than the left.

In an age of endless crisis and constant mobilization, Hannah Arendt’s message is quietly radical: the goal is not to feel righteous—it is to build a world where freedom can endure.

Arendt might say we’re watching a classic revolutionary pathology play out in slow motion: movements replacing politics with moral crusade. When that happens, institutions stop being arenas for disagreement and start being treated as obstacles to righteousness. Courts, universities, media, legislatures—once they fail to deliver the “correct” outcome, they’re declared illegitimate. That’s how democratic organs get hollowed out from the inside.

You see it on both ends of the spectrum. One side tries to discredit elections, the other to delegitimize speech and process. Different flags, same impulse: “If you disagree, you don’t belong.” That’s exactly the move Arendt warned about—the moment when “the people” becomes a moral category rather than a political one.

The tragedy is that Americans are still surrounded by the very tools Arendt thought precious—local institutions, courts, assemblies, constitutional processes—but more and more activists treat those tools as corrupt by definition. They want purity, not procedures. That’s the road that leads away from freedom, even when it’s paved with good intentions.

Sadly, On Revolution predicts nothing good in the current situation in Iran.  The Jihadis that run the country have already murdered thousands. They could murder tens or hundreds of thousands and believe they are doing God's will. And if the mullahs fall whatever follows them will be more interested in power than freedom. 

 

Living on the Edge: Reading All of Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger

Over the past fifteen months I read all six of Sebastian Junger’s books. I didn’t plan it as a project, but once it started it took on the coherence of one. It began in October 2024, when I heard Junger speak at the Hannah Arendt Center conference at Bard College. His talk focused on Tribe, but what stayed with me afterward—especially over lunch—was not any single argument, but his way of seeing the world. He spoke about danger, belonging, and the fragile structures that hold people together in crisis with the clarity of someone who had tested those ideas with his own body.

I had already seen Restrepo in 2010, the year I returned from Iraq. I watched it in a small theater in the Village with Jim Dao, then the New York Times’ war correspondent embedded with the 10th Mountain Division. Dao had encouraged me to see it, and he was right. The film didn’t feel like most war documentaries, which are shot from relative safety or filtered through official narratives. Junger and Tim Hetherington were in the middle of the firefights. The camera shook because bullets were flying. It was impossible not to feel that the filmmakers were risking their lives alongside the soldiers they were recording. Whoever in Army Public Affairs allowed that film to be released was either extraordinarily brave or quietly suicidal. Nothing in it was sanitized.

What struck me most at the time was how exposed Camp Restrepo was compared to my own deployment. I spent much of my Iraq tour on a large airbase. We had missile attacks, and we took badly aimed fire on night flights, but it was nothing like being in an isolated valley surrounded by hostile forces. The men at Restrepo were under threat every hour. When I later read War, Junger’s written account of that deployment, I gained a deeper understanding of the unit and of his own presence there. It only increased my respect for what he and Hetherington had done.

After the Arendt conference, I decided to begin with Tribe. It was the conceptual bridge between Restrepo and everything else Junger had written. I have known the comfort and intensity of belonging, and I also know how fleeting it can be. My best tank crew—the one I trained for months and that shot at the top of our battalion gunnery—fell apart within weeks. One man was reassigned. Another left the Army. Another went to a different unit. As Junger makes clear in both Tribe and Freedom, a tribe can be for life, or it can be for only as long as the mission lasts. Either way, while it exists, it feels more real than almost anything else.

Freedom extended that insight. It argues that human beings are built to endure danger, risk, and uncertainty, and that safety, while pleasant, can be psychologically corrosive. Junger’s stories of people choosing hardship over comfort made me rethink my own career, my own decisions to re-enlist and to seek out difficult environments. Comfort is not always the same as meaning.

Two of Junger’s books unexpectedly returned me to my childhood in the Boston suburbs. A Death in Belmont brought back the fear that hung over our neighborhoods during the era of the Boston Strangler. I was a kid then, but I remember how adults spoke in hushed tones, how doors were locked, how an invisible threat hovered over everyday life. Junger treated that story not just as true crime but as a social mystery, a way of examining how communities process terror.

The Perfect Storm did something similar through nature. Growing up near the Atlantic, I always knew the sea could turn deadly. I had seen nor’easters from shore. Junger turned that abstract danger into a gripping reality, showing how ordinary working men—fishermen just doing their jobs—could be swallowed by forces far beyond their control. Like Belmont, it is a book about how thin the line is between normal life and catastrophe.

Then there was In My Time of Dying. That book forced me to look again at my own near-death experiences. I have had two. One was an explosion that left me blind. The other was a racing crash that broke my neck and nine other bones. I faced mortality, but not in the prolonged, grinding way Junger did. His clarity about what it means to cross that threshold and come back from it is unlike anything I’ve read. It is not mystical. It is analytic, almost clinical, and because of that it is profoundly unsettling.

After finishing all six books, something shifted. I realized that, for all my brushes with danger, I had lived a comparatively sheltered life. Junger had gone farther—to the edge of war, to the edge of the sea, to the edge of his own biological existence—and then returned to tell the story with discipline and precision. He did not glamorize risk. He examined it.

Taken together, Junger’s books describe a world more dangerous than I experienced and more honest than most of what passes for contemporary nonfiction. He writes about soldiers under fire, fishermen in storms, families stalked by a serial killer, and a man dying on a hospital bed, but the subject is always the same: how human beings behave when the structures that protect them fall away. Reading him in sequence revealed a single, sustained inquiry into what it means to live on the edge of disaster—and how, sometimes, that is where life feels most real.

Sherlock Holmes, The Dog That Didn't Bark, and Protests in Iran

 

The phrase “The dog that didn’t bark” is one of my favorite metaphors from Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination.  In this case part of the 1892 Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze."

In the story, a valuable racehorse disappears and its trainer is murdered. Inspector Gregory is puzzled because the watchdog in the stable made no noise during the crime. Holmes points out that this is exactly the key fact.

Here is the crucial exchange:

Gregory: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The implication:

The dog knew the intruder. If a stranger had come, the dog would have barked. Because it stayed silent, the culprit must have been someone familiar—an insider.

Since then, “the dog that didn’t bark” has become shorthand for:

An important absence — something that should have happened, but didn’t, and therefore reveals the truth.

The people of Iran have been protesting the tyrannical murderous Jihadi regime that runs their country for a month, at the cost of their lives. Yesterday 200 protesters were killed.  

Why are the campus protesters who were out in the street in support of Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters since October 7, 2023, not out in support of the people of Iran?  

Where were those campus protestors when the Iranian people strove for freedom in 2022? In 2009?  

No Jews, no news. 

The people who chant "Globalize the Intifada" in America and are silent about Iran are showing how much they care about the suffering of Islamic people.  

They don't, unless they can blame the Jews.

While protesters in Iran were slaughtered by security forces, the pro-terrorist Jew haters were on the street in Manhattan chanting: 

"There is only one solution; Intifada, Revolution!" "Death to the IDF" and "Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here."

George Orwell’s Three-Power World—and Ours

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does not present a world of many nations. It presents a world of three empires—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—locked in permanent, shifting conflict. The alliances are deliberately fluid. One day Oceania is allied with Eastasia against Eurasia; the next day it is the reverse. The public is required to instantly forget yesterday’s enemy and embrace today’s. The deeper purpose of this system is not military victory but mental control. If the Party can change who the enemy is, it can change what reality itself means.

What Orwell was describing was not a fantasy of chaos but a theory of stability: a three-power system in which no one wins, no one loses, and conflict never ends.

We now live in something very close to that world.

The United States dominates the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic order. China dominates East Asia and increasingly the Pacific and much of the global manufacturing system. Russia dominates a northern arc—from Eastern Europe through Central Asia—using energy, war, and coercion to compensate for its weaker economy. None of these powers is strong enough to rule the world, but each is strong enough to enforce a regional sphere.

And just like in Orwell, alliances are not moral commitments; they are tools.

Europe is “America’s ally” while being economically bound to China. India works with Washington while buying Russian oil. Turkey is in NATO while coordinating with Moscow. Saudi Arabia shifts between the dollar and the yuan. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transactional. The public is told these are contradictions. In reality, they are the system working exactly as designed.

This is where Trump fits in.

Trump does not think in terms of rules-based order or international law. He thinks in terms of turf. Venezuela is in America’s hemisphere, so Washington gets to decide what happens there. Ukraine sits in Russia’s historical sphere, so Putin’s actions are something to be bargained over rather than confronted absolutely. Taiwan sits in China’s orbit, so deterrence is maintained rhetorically while real red lines quietly soften. None of this requires Trump to admire Putin or Xi. It only requires him to accept that great powers get their neighborhoods.

Africa, in this worldview, is what Orwell called a “disputed zone”—a place where all three powers operate, extract, and interfere, precisely because no one controls it. China builds ports and mines. Russia sends mercenaries and weapons. The U.S. applies aid, sanctions, and pressure. The people who live there are not the point. The denial of territory to rivals is.

Orwell’s insight was that a three-power world does not bring peace. It brings endless, low-level conflict and constant narrative manipulation. Today’s ally can be tomorrow’s threat. Yesterday’s outrage can be erased by tomorrow’s deal.

The real war, then and now, is not over land. It is over memory—who gets to say what has always been true.

Orwell is the Prophet of Trump's Brave New World

I am among those who believed the Aldous Huxley predicted the future in his Brave New World. It was not Big Brother who crushed us individually and as a people.  We would simply sell out for drugs and entertainment.  

Which is true. And electing a game show host President underlined that truth with a Sharpie.  

And yet, world politics really is devolving into the spheres of influence Orwell predicted.  Huxley saw our individual fall into oblivion. Orwell saw the new world order.

Poet Flyer by E. John Knapp, a Review

 

E. John Knapp’s Poet Flyer surprised me. The beginning of the story is routine and predictable as a war memoir. Whirlwind love. Whirlwind training. Go to war on arrival in England. On the surface it looks modest: a slim volume of poems written by a former B-17 navigator, telling the story of his life in verse. Then with no warning, tragedy rips through Knapp's life.  From that fatal day forward the book becomes an account of survival. Not survival in the cinematic sense, but the quieter, lonelier kind—the survival of the man who lived while his crew did not.

Knapp does not frame his story as a war epic. He begins with training, with the formation of a ten-man bomber crew that becomes, by necessity, a family. Anyone who has served in a tightly knit unit will recognize the texture of those early pages the way shared danger forges intimacy faster than time ever could. Knapp makes us feel how completely his identity became bound up with theirs.

The central tragedy of the book is brutally simple. Knapp is grounded for a mission. The crew flies without him. Their aircraft is shot down after returning over the target—a fatal decision by the mission leader. Other crews see three parachutes. Six men, at least, are dead. Knapp survives because of an accident of paperwork and timing. 

What makes Poet Flyer extraordinary is how Knapp refuses to soften that fact. There is no melodrama, no attempt to turn the event into a lesson. Instead, the poems circle it again and again, the way a mind circles a trauma it can never resolve. He writes about guilt not as a single emotion but as a permanent companion, one that walks beside marriage, fatherhood, career, and old age. The war ends. His life goes on. But his empty seat in the bomber never disappears.

And yet this is not a book of despair. One of Knapp’s great achievements is to show how a person can carry unbearable knowledge and still live fully. He comes home to his wife. They raise children. He works. He loves. But always, somewhere in the background, there is the image of a burning aircraft and three white blossoms of parachute silk. The happiness is real—and so is the haunting.

The choice to tell this story in verse is crucial. Prose would have invited explanation and narrative smoothing. Poetry allows Knapp to write the way memory actually works: in flashes, fragments, images that refuse to be put in order. His language is plain. He writes like a man trained to calculate courses and distances, now measuring the space between what happened and what should have happened.

Poet Flyer is a war story that does not pretend war ends when the shooting stops. It is about survivor’s guilt—but also about moral luck, about the terrifying truth that who lives and who dies is often decided by chance.

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A particularly painful aspect of the story for me is how John lost his comrades.  My uncle Jack was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force from 1958-1978. He was a navigator on a KC-97 tanker plane in 1963.  He was on stand down to get married.  Just before his wedding his entire crew was killed in a midair explosion. I was 10 years old and attended the wedding with my family. I can vaguely remember a very somber event.  Jack did three full-year tours in Vietnam and three shorter tours after that tragic event.  

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.