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.

Humorists: From Hogarth to Noel Coward

By Paul Johnson

Anything by the great British writer Paul Johnson is worthy ready.

The Union War

By Gary W. Gallagher

Gallagher, one of the nation?s preeminent Civil War scholars and a professor at the University of Virginia, deals in his latest book of the question of why did the North fight?

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

By Edward Dolnick

This is an entertaining and illuminating volume about the 17th century's revolution in science and math that saw, among other things, the creation of calculus by Isaac Newton, followed by his towering work of pure genius, Principia.