What Karl's reading

After three years preparing The Triumph of William McKinley by reading very little but books, letters, articles and newspapers from the Gilded Age, I’m trying to get back into my regular routine, which I’ll chronicle here with an occasional review of what I’ve read.

Full Black: A Thriller

By Brad Thor

It's another rock 'em, sock 'em adventure from a master of 21st century counter-terrorism thrillers, Chicagoan Brad Thor.

Paradise Lost

By John Milton

Got to re-read some of the classics every year. Was introduced to Milton by a professor at George Mason University and what a big favor that was.

The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828

By Lynn Hudson Parsons

This is one of Oxford University Press’s wonderful “Pivotal Moments in American History” series and its editors (Pulitzer Prize winners David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson) chose well in picking Professor Parsons for this book.

Inventing George Washington: America's Founder, in Myth and Memory

By Edward G. Lengel

In this slim volume, the editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington charts the changing ways in which Americans have perceived the Father of Our Country, from a wave of myth-making in the early 1800s to a wave of debunkers in the last century.