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2 months ago | 
latimes.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them?
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2 months ago | 
yahoo.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them?
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Dec 27, 2024 | 
latimes.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Book Review Mothers and Sons By Adam HaslettLittle, Brown: 336 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Peter Fischer buries his personal demons in work, work and more work. An immigration lawyer in Manhattan, his job is one long emergency: He advocates for asylees seeking legal standing and safe harbor in America. Success means a new and far more secure life. Failure means deportation.
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Aug 7, 2024 | 
latimes.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Book Review Highway Thirteen: Stories By Fiona McFarlaneFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 255 pages, $27If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. A serial killer rends a jagged hole in the fabric of our moral universe. How can someone commit a murder, then another and another, and how can they get away with it? Where does the impulse to kill begin, and why?
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
latimes.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Book Review Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer By Robert SullivanFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 448 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. There are a few verifiable truths about Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan. He was born in 1840 in Ireland.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
latimes.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Book Review The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook By Hampton SidesDoubleday: 432 pages, $35If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The story of Capt. James Cook’s third voyage has all the elements of a Greek tragedy — hubris, good intentions gone awry, fatal error.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
yahoo.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
The story of Capt. James Cook’s third voyage has all the elements of a Greek tragedy — hubris, good intentions gone awry, fatal error. The English sea captain, an old man by 18th century standards, had already made two worldwide voyages of discovery when he was coaxed by his admirers into one more journey. Though his expedition touched down in some of the world’s most pristine, magical places, it set in motion their decay by introducing lethal diseases and invasive species.
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Feb 8, 2024 | 
yahoo.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Everyone knows by now that a virus can bring a nation to its knees — the tiny terrorists of smallpox, Spanish flu and COVID-19 have disrupted America’s story in lethal and tragic ways. But what if one small glitch in a virus’ makeup changed everything? What if the smallpox that raged through America’s Native population had been replaced by a less lethal variant? What if Native Americans survived smallpox, fought white invaders to a standstill and created their own version of a modern society?
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
Most Americans remember Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a ruthless narcissist who waged war against his many enemies and killed his fellow countrymen by the thousands. More than that, he represented one of America’s biggest strategic failures—the U.S. government’s erroneous conclusion, after 9/11, that Saddam held weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them on the United States and its allies.
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Nov 27, 2023 | 
rep-am.com | Mary Ann Gwinn
James Longstreet was the most loyal of Confederates. A Southerner, slave owner and second in command to Robert E. Lee, Longstreet, despite grave misgivings about Lee’s strategy for the battle of Gettysburg, followed orders and led a charge that decimated the Confederate Army and destroyed Southern hopes. But Longstreet had friends on both sides of the conflict, notably Ulysses S. Grant, Union Army commander and a fast friend since the two were cadets at West Point.
