Richard Pipes, formerly the Baird Professor of History at Harvard University, wrote many books on Russian and Soviet history.  A Concise History of the Russian Revolution condenses the events leading up to, during, and immediately following that event into roughly four hundred pages of accessible, highly engaging narrative and analysis.  The book appears to have been written for a general audience, not academic specialists.  Pipes divides his analysis of the Revolution…

Jacques Barzun’s book, interpretive and critical rather than merely encyclopedic, traces the development of Western cultural and intellectual life from the European Renaissance to the late 20^th century.  He argues that the end of the twentieth century also brought the end of five hundred years of Western cultural life, a change he laments.  For Barzun, the sixteenth century represents the dawn of modern Western culture while the twentieth century represents the…

Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins, a cultural historian, offers a fresh interpretation of the First World War.  He begins not with the war, but with a Russian ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps or The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky with music by Igor Stravinsky.  When Le Sacre premiered in Paris in May, 1913, it caused the audience to riot because of its unconventionality.  Eksteins uses this story about…

If you are interested in learning more about North Korea, a politically isolated, Stalinist country ruled by the Kim dynasty since 1948, then consider these two books:  Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (2004) and Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010). 

Martin’s book runs nearly 900 pages and offers a detailed narrative of Kim-Il Sung’s rise to power.  Kim’s political ascent…