With all our guns, all our bombs, all our intelligence — are we actually any safer than the nations with essentially no security or national defense?

Why Mao Tse-tung Still Matters

I’m attracted to historical biographies.  Perhaps it’s an inherent sense of curiosity combined with the obligation to spend at least some measure of time reading the works of dedicated authors who in rare instances spent not merely years, but decades conducting extensive research and ultimately giving new life to people and subjects we thought we already knew well, but may have misunderstood.

Such is definitely the case with one of my favorite books, The Power Broker:  Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction. 

Such is also the case for any of the four other Robert A. Caro books on Lyndon B. Johnson, clearly the most thorough research and writing exercise ever conducted on a U.S President by one man.  Such is also the case with John Adams by David McCullough, arguably our most noted historian.  I could go on and on.

Such is also the case with “Mao:  The Untold Story,” written by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.