A disappointing work of fiction pitched as fact
928155
Given that this is pitched as non-fiction, it is a disappointment to read what is so clearly a fabricated account of Castaneda's alleged experiences with a Yaqui shaman.  Any questions as to the veracity of this story should check into Richard de Mille's evisceration of Castaneda's work -- including the discovery that the author was at the school library checking out books about first hand ethnographic accounts of experiences with shaman while claiming he was spending time with his "teacher."  Another hilarious oversight: much of this book is spent dealing with the effects of peyote, a plant that was not even a part of the Yaqui shaman culture.

With all of this in mind, it is a mildly entertaining read until it becomes so brazenly clear that Casteneda is setting himself to be the powerful "chosen one."  More appropriate titles would be "The Idiot's Guide to Starting a Cult" or "Co-opting Native American Culture for Fun and Profit."  Castaneda, quite unfortunately, was largely successful on both counts.

For those looking for a true, powerful historical treatment of the subject read Mircea Eliade's "Shamanism."
2077329
The scenario painted by the author is not believable and falls far short of telling a believable story.

It is obvious this was written in a hurry with insufficient research..
1857452
Lepores book is so blatantly and bizarrely -fictional- that I cant even begin to understand how she got it published under the Harvard
historian banner. This book is only a little better than a hardback version of the National Enquirer. There are HUNDREDS of historical inaccuracies, especially when writing about the Marston family 'history'.  There are incredibly damning stories put forth by Lepore as fact. There are also some clearly intentional misrepresentations. The author, under the Harvard banner, is selling fiction as fact. This book is as big a sham as its author.
3134534
The novel has many, many historical flaws that render the story implausible at best. One gets the impression that it was written for a quick read, quick sell, and then right to the big-screen. In view of its publication date following shortly on the heels of the hit movie "Gladiator," one can almost see the author rushing to cash-in on the Roman "craze," spawned by that movie. All that would be fine, a light-entertainment piece aimed at a mass-market audience; however, the author repeatedly boasts of his extensive historical research and accuracy in creating this novel, while persistently making gross historical errors throughout.
As other reviews have noted, the principle characters are thinly drawn, with modern viewpoints that have little relation to the era in which they are set. The protagonist, Attilius, condemns slavery (even as he makes use of it) in a civilization that was built on slavery and could not have existed without it. He somehow manages to deduce that Mt. Vesuvious is about to erupt, even though volcanic eruptions were totally unknown to the Romans of his time. Even the most scientific mind of his era (who figures prominently in the novel) Pliny the Elder, has no clue, but a simple aquatic engineer figures this out??? His love-interest Corelia's very name smacks of shoddy scholarship on the part of the author, who poses himself as an expert in Romanology. By Roman tradition, her name would be Ampliatia, after her father; the name "Corelia" has no connection to the girl's family, and thus is not an accurate Roman name. But perhaps the most annoying, and laughable mistake is also the most minute; everywhere in the novel, the characters are burning candles---yes, wax candles! One would think, with all of Mr. Harris's indepth research of Roman engineering, that he might have deduced that candles are a relatively modern invention, first appearing in the middle ages, virtually unknown to the ancient Romans. Might this be why not a single candle, candlestick, or candle holder was found in the ruins of Pompeii or Herculaneum? There's not a single Roman artifact indicating the use of wax candles for illumination; yet there are thousands upon thousands of oil lamps from the Roman era. This somehow escaped the author's attention. Exactly what kind of research did he conduct for his "meticulously" researched novel?
1891176
Just a warning - this book is based on a fictional character supposedly wandering through prehistory describing what he sees.  Chapter 3 begins, "Unable to sleep, John Lubbock sits by the lakeshore watching bats at work..."

Very annoying but worse it involves imaginative descriptions of supposed prehistoric scenes with little distinction between what is known and what is fiction.  Archaeologists will be enlightened to learn that the artist at Pech Merle worked in a drug induced state for many hours until exhausted.  All this time a small boy held a lamp for him.

Ah, the wonders of science.  Exhaustion dating, who knew?  What could I have learned if I had read on?

Apparently some like this approach.  I would think that those who want a speculatively fleshed out story would prefer the illustrated works from National Geographic, the Smithsonian and others. A lot has been done about fleshing out the appearance of our ancestors from their fossils.
1380904
I'm quite surprised at the uniformly favorable reviews of this book.  If a history is even mildly engaging, it keeps my interest.  But here the author assumes too much and gets side-tracked in banalities and superfluous detail instead of succinctly telling the big story in a "very short introduction."  I didn't finish it or pass it on, which is rare for this lay historian.

Another example of the futility of trying to find a short-cut to an understanding of historical events.  Your better off reading fiction (Tale of Two Cities) than this muddle.
2425445
A few problems with this lame attempt to produce "non-fiction."
(1) The author's research (if one can call it that) is riddled with most serious...even outlandish errors.
He states that in 1940-41, the U.S. possessed some 51,000 military aircraft pilots, then going further on to state that Great Britain and Nazi Germany possessed (respectively) 500,000 and 1,000,000 military aircraft pilots!
(2) At a very early point in the book he then goes highly political...trashing the Roosevelt administration on their New Deal policies and domestic initiatives which have absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand which is the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I am leaving out this same author refering to the former Democratic governor of New York, Alfred Smith, as a being a "left wing" politician when actually the embittered Smith had long allied himself with the far right Liberty Lobby in 1936 in an attempt to defeat Frankilin Roosevelt's bid for a second term as president.
Even if labeled as "historical fiction" this book would still suffer a complete lack of credibility.
4021026
This biography of Edward Teller, which I found to be disappointing, comes to us from Peter Goodchild, a documentary maker for the BBC.

After reading this book, I didn't feel that I had came to know Edward Teller, who was a very interesting, if controversial, man.  I had learned a little about his origins, his academic achievements, his projects, and the controversies in which he was embroiled, but only rarely did I feel that Goodchild had really gotten to the bottom of what had happened.  This book reads more like a Life magazine article or a description of a new wondersoap than like a work of history.

I disliked that Goodchild makes interesting points, but then doesn't provide sources to support them.  An example: Goodchild quotes an American soldier to the effect that the US military knew and tolerated that top secret information about the work at Los Alamos was being flown to the Soviet Union by the planeload, and names the air field where this is said to have happened.  This is a spectacular allegation, if true.  Unfortunately the sources he offers to substantiate this claim were a Soviet code clerk who worked at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, and an American soldier who sold his story at the height of the Red Scare.  Both wrote books that needed spectacular stories to sell well.  Neither the Venona decrypts nor the Mitrokhin archive, both of which have provided us with a good understanding of how the Soviets exported technology from Los Alamos allude to these clandestine flights.  This is not to claim with certainty that these flights never happened, but rather to say that I feel that by not explaining why these claims didn't become common knowledge, Goodchild leaves his readers confused.  Was there no FOIA or other source to substantiate these spectacular claims?

Teller was involved in Operation Chariot, a project to use H-bombs to dig a harbor that nobody wanted on Alaska's ice-bound northern coast.  In the end the opposition of the indigenous population led to the operation being cancelled.  The entire episode, which I think raises many questions about Teller's psychology and judgment, is more or less described in the sterile prose otherwise used to describe how to program a video recording device.  I was also quite disappointed by his treatment of J. Robert Oppenheimer, about whom Goodchild makes so many subtle and sometimes unfair digs that his book seems to be more of a political tract than a serious biography.

As someone very interested by the era and its scientists, I was rather surprised that he omits John von Neuman from his "suspects list" of possible inspirations for Dr. Strangelove.  There is a strong case for this:  like Strangelove, von Neuman was wheelchair-bound,  spoke German as a native speaker, consulted for the Rand Corporation, was an authority on game theory, and at times advocated a preemptive war against the Soviet Union.

A further annoyance is that Goodchild doesn't include footnotes, but rather has quotes for some sources at the back of the book.  This is infuriating, as some of his ideas are interesting, and it is only when you flip to the back of the book that you learn whether this is or isn't one of the ideas for which he provides corroboration.  This is one of the few books I have ever read that doesn't have a single positive review of itself on its back cover.  To end this review on a positive note, it is one of the few biographies of Dr. Teller, so you may have to read it for what information it offers, and perhaps to use it as a doorstop.  I anxiously await a book that does justice to Edward Teller's genius, life, and times.
109484
I had heard good things about the author's earlier book Tuxedo Park, and the premise of this one sounded interesting when I saw it, so I went ahead and picked it up.  Big mistake.  A Covert Affair is not what it purports to be.

It opens with a chapter about Paul Child being questioned in connection with suspected Communist activity years after his time in the OSS during the war.  Then most of the first half of the book is devoted to the wartime OSS activities not of Paul and Julia Child, but of one Jane Foster, into whose story Paul and Julia figure only tangentially.  Then there is a brief interlude about Paul and Julia's budding romance and marriage, after which the author goes on at some length about how Senator McCarthy and the FBI harassed poor Jane on a witch hunt for Communists.  To hear the author tell it, Communists posed no real threat during these early years of the Cold War and if Jane Foster was involved with Communism at all it was a youthful fling when she was innocent and naive.  To make matters worse, the "guilt by association" tactics of the anti-Communists in the U.S. government threatened to destroy the lives and careers of many completely innocent bystanders, such as the Childs.

The problem with this narrative is that the actual facts the author presents (let alone the one's she doesn't) don't support it.  To begin with, she is ultimately forced to acknowledge (though she does so only in an appendix!) that Jane Foster was in fact a Soviet agent taking orders from the KGB!  As deplorable as some of McCarthy's and the FBI's methods may have been, on those grounds alone their investigation into her cannot credibly be portrayed as a "witch hunt."  Further, whether Paul Child's career in the State department really was hampered is debatable, and even if it was it may have been doing him a favor as by this account he then went on to have a more fulfilling career pursuing his art and working in Julia's burgeoning business (which clearly wasn't harmed by her association with a known Communist).

So leaving aside that the book is not about what it claims to be, it also badly fails to demonstrate what it aims to.  Other than that, I suppose it had some interesting material.
3504822
Many books have been written about the "Great Hunger." I was expecting a historical account of one story about this time, the Jeanie Johnston. Since there wasn't enough to write about the ship (the Jeanie Johnston), the author tells the story of the famine and the British attempts to solve the problem. She also attempts to tell the story of one family that made the journey, but she has only bare facts to go on, so she makes up a lot.

Her style is to fictionalize a non-fiction story and to embellish. This, in my opinion, is not history, but fiction with a little history thrown in. She does include cited quotations she has some footnotes but much of her writing is not backed up by fact. I kept wanting to yell, "HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?" She makes up a lot for dramatic effect. For example, someone's wife "waited piously." HDYKT? She also describes people in detail: A crew member is described as "fair-skinned and a little short for his age,... [with] gray eyes...." HDYKT? Did she see photographs of these people?

The story begins like a novel in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in 1883 with a bit of a mystery. But remember, this book is supposed to be non-fiction, so what's going on here?  It sounded like she was trying to mimic Stephen Ambrose or James Michener, but she's not in their class at all.
She also uses the term "genocide" (p. 40) "one of the world's most notorious genocides," but there's no footnote on this line and I wondered if she was just slinging words around for effect. Tim Pat Coogan, who is a real historian, has also written about the Great Hunger, and he discusses the question of whether there was "genocide" involved, but he doesn't use the word lightly.
Miles would have been better off writing a novel about the story of the people on the ship.  She's no historian and the publisher should never have let this book be labeled as historical. Of course, with the sad state of publishing these days, anything goes.
If you want to read this book, just remember the author is making up much of what she writes. It's NOT non-fiction.
3407973
I enjoy Crichton as an author, he has a varied and exciting body of work... and that makes this effort all the more disappointing.

He uses this novel as a means of sharing his commentary on the state of environmentalism. It comes through as 80% commentary and 20% fiction. It causes his normally engrossing characters and storylines to become shallow, predictable, and tied together by a very disjointed storyline.

If Crichton has valid concerns and facts he feels a need to share, he should write a non-fiction book on the topic. His name would still help it sell many copies.

Hopefully he will return to true non-fiction writing for us fans of the stories that brought him credibility as a writer.
4615218
Though well written, it is obvious a rewrite of history, a feminists view of what they wish would have been rather than what was.  After reading the novel, I realized it was that, a novel, not a true historical biography.  I also realized the author was applying wishful thinking.  I did further research, and discovered there is no documentation for her assertions.  It is true that women of that era subjugated their careers for their husband, but there is no evidence that Mileva actually contributed to the work to the degree this novel entertains.  Yes, it is entertaining, well written, but false or what might pass as "fake news" in our present climate.  Too many will read this and believe it to be factual.  I really detest works that subvert truth in this manner.
3429121
A former coworker of mine, I can attest to the fact that Annie Jacobsen can certainly spin a yarn. But after reading "Area 51:" I also am dismayed at errors in simple facts (Richard Bissell's tumble off of Rattlesnake Mountain was no closer to the Connecticut coastline than Pomona CA is to the California coastline, for instance). Worse, contention that the "alien pilots" of the spaceship that crashed in Roswell NM were mutant Soviet pilots is completely absurd, given the manner in which Jacobsen presents it as "fact" with no supporting evidence.

These errors - the simple mistakes and the ridiculous assertions - mar what would otherwise be a facinating book. I am sure that most of the facts are presented correctly - but without a research deep-dive that outstrips her own, I do not have confidence that any given "fact" is true or false. It is a shame that an account this important and detailed is derailed by ever-present accuracy concerns.
3079191
This book should be treated as a work of fiction.

It's an interesting fantasy to think that the world is run by a "committee of 300" and I would even be willing to believe it (in fact I would like to believe it), but this author makes a bunch of bold claims without backing them up one bit. Not only that, but he doesn't even say what his own qualifications are and comes across in this writing as some sort of paranoid wacko.

In this way, one cannot tell what information in this book is simply fabricated by the author and what information might indeed be true. So, one is instead forced to write it all off as fiction because none of the claims made in the book are backed up with facts or references at all.
2383610
I was expecting a fictional character story presenting factual information.  This book seemed more like a recital of facts found in any biography or the internet.  So, there's interesting information albeit presented in a dry, quite boring format.  It also does not track in a logical manner, weaving facts "discovered" later by the supposed author and quotes the character would not have had access to at the time events were occurring.  I had a hard time slogging through this Kindle First book, though normally I enjoy them.  The premise was great; the execution left much to be desired.
400813
I really really wanted to like this book. Some of it is interesting and true, but it was poorly researched. All it takes is a quick google of some of these "deaths" to find no legit reference for them. In fact some of them were located on joke lists, like the spoofed FBI top 20 homicide lists. Sorry, but next time just do more research from legit sources, not just blogs that print fiction as if it's fact. Also, there is a whole section of the book copied word for word from Wikipedia's list of "Unsolved Murders". thumbs down sir. Thumbs down.
2550006
I wanted to like "Warburg in Rome." I really did. I admire James Carroll's non-fiction a great. I enjoy his radio interviews. So I was expecting a good and enlightening read. Alas, it didn't happen. He does not convert the passion of his convictions and his historical research into a well-told story. His strongly-held beliefs find their way into the mouths of his characters, but they are better served in essays or books. As a mystery novel, a who-done-it, I never found it clear who was being pursued or which of the atrocities was supposed to drive the investigation (and, for that matter, the plot). At the end of the book, I had no sense that anything had been solved, much less that justice had been served. Some of the dialogue is over-wrought and unnatural; and his discomfort when he is writing about sexual activity is palpable. I fully intend to continue reading his non-fiction works as they appear. But I can't recommend "Warburg in Rome."