Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbi...
30 Mar 202054min
The Origins of World War One
Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unneces...
12 Mar 20201h 7min
Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019)
In his new book Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation (Custom House, 2019), Steve Vogel tells the astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of ...
11 Mar 20201h 1min
Jamie L. H. Goodall, "Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars" (The History Press, 2020)
The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy to...
11 Mar 202047min
Sarah Burns, "The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism" (UP of Kansas, 2020)
Sarah Burns’ new book The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) pulls together distinct threads in analyzing the theoretical f...
9 Mar 202050min
Aimee Fox, "Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities and t...
5 Mar 202034min
Kathy Peiss, "The Information Hunters" (Oxford UP, 2019)
While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to coll...
4 Mar 202034min
Maria Ryan, "Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2019)
America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played ou...
2 Mar 202041min
