Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory by Paul VanDevelder is, ultimately, a very sad book. Not just for the content of the book, devoted mainly to broken treaty, genocide, forced relocation and all the other ills that American Indians have suffered through the centuries, but also because it's the perfect example of a good writer trying for too much and accomplishing nothing as a result.

In the book VanDevelder tells the story of... just about everything. In 243 pages he touches on, amongst other things, the forced relocation of the Mandan tribes in 1951, the legal history of the rights and responsibilities of the U.S. Federal government towards Native Americans, the history of the Supreme Court's attitude towards native Americans, the nature and development of Manifest Destiny, the history and meaning of the Louisiana Purchase, and, with particular emphasis, the negotiation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie between the U.S. Government and the Native American tribes.

John Lukacs has been one of America's best historians since he fled to the United States from Hungary in 1945, and has been one of the most prolific writers in the field of American history. While his books cover a wide range of subjects and topics, from the Cold War to Churchill's speeches in Parliament to much more, his most touching and moving book, until now, was Confessions of an Original Sinner, an autobiographical discussion of his historical convictions and beliefs. Now Lukacs has written a follow up to that book, Last Rites, which examines his historical mindset, the mindsets of the world around him, his life, his old age (Lukacs is an octogenarian,) and much more.

Every so often a book comes out that, at first glance, just screams to be read. The Plot to Kill God by Paul Froese is one of those books, not only for its arresting title but because of its subject; the Soviet Union's attempt to remove religion from its society. The problem is the book doesn't hold up to its promise. The book dithers between settling down as either a history or a sociological study of the issue, chooses neither and proceeds to try and sit in the no mans land in between, sucking out almost any useful value it could have had. While the book does maintain some use, it's sorely lacking in every field and simply not worth the read, to say nothing of buying it.

Every now and again, a book comes along that uncovers hidden lines of communication, that explores the strange synchronicities that are practically the definition of that bit of wisdom that reminds us that truth is stranger than fiction. The uncrowned king of such secret history no doubt remains Greil Marcus, whose Lipstick Traces is a tour of the bizarre web that runs from late medieval heresies to the bleeding edges of punk rock. The new book Apocalypse Jukebox written by David Janssen and Edward Whitelock follows along similar lines, beginning with the edges of the religious imagination and diving into the heart of popular music to uncover meanings that we've all been singing about for years without knowing.

The cast of characters ranges from the usual suspects, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, to musicians not normally considered part of the apocalyptic tradition, including Sleater-Kinney, Devo and Green Day. In American Idiot, for instance, Janssen and Whitelock find an apocalypse of drowning in the ordinary, of a culture closer to Huxley's Brave New World than the Who's teenage wasteland.

News Director Robert Glass interviews author Remy Stern on his book But Wait... There's More, a history of the infomercial business. Along the way they discuss the origin of Infomercials, infomercial scams, Kevin Trudeau, the Home Shopping Network, and much more.

For more information on But Wait... There's More you can read the WHRW News review of the book here or you can visit the publisher's website for more information.

Judicial Review. Two words which encapsulate the primary purpose of the Supreme Court. In some ways it is the most powerful of the three branches of our government. Yet, by contrast, at its inception it was almost powerless, overlooked by all and confined to a small conference room in the buildings of another department. John Jay once referred to the court as “This great Abortion” and alleged that it would never grow to the power necessary for it to have meaning. Cliff Sloan and David McKean’s The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court is an excellent examination of the one court case that catapulted the Supreme Court from obscurity into national prominence.

Hundreds of pages of books have been dedicated to Iran in recent years. Most of them follow in the vein of the execrable Robert Baer book The Devil We Know or Ali Ansari's average Confronting Iran, viewing Iran solely through its interactions with the United States and its neighbors. Iran's history is reduced to buzzwords, Mossadeq, the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini and more show up, but only as character actors playing a predetermined part, and then wandering back into the scenery of the stage. As for actual histories of Iran, they are few and far between. In the past ten years there have been, perhaps, half a dozen general histories of Modern Iran, no histories of the Iran-Iraq War, no biographies of the Shah, and only two biographies of Ayatollah Khomeini. This made Gholam Reza Afkhami's biography of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, The Life and Times of the Shah, a potentially groundbreaking and fantastic book. Instead, it's average, barely, with its horrendous flaws standing out in sharp contrast the subtleties of its successes. Worth reading, perhaps, but not for the reasons that would be expected.

There's a curiously large genre of books that's hard to describe. They're non-fiction and describe an aspect of the modern world, but are not serious enough in subject or approach to be considered current affairs books. On the other hand, they're too serious, though humorous all the same, to be considered humor books. It's a large and overpopulated genre, and because of its broad, and yet not truly serious, nature it's hard for any book in it to truly stand out. However, But Wait... There's More by Remy Stern, is a fantastically magnificent book in its own right and is one of the best to ever come out of the genre.

It is an understatement to say that Fool by Christopher Moore is a work of complete deranged genius. Moore “borrows” the story of King Lear, adds the witches from Macbeth, a Halmet-esk ghost, and has quite a story. Lear is told from the point of view of the Fool, thus the name of the book. Moore embellishes the dullest parts of Lear, mostly with bawdy jokes, sex scenes, violence, and ridiculous scenarios. He gives such life to the characters in Lear that appear in the original play as flat and two-dimensional. Lear’s two older daughters are very bright and strong, but also very sexual and murderous. Oswald is turned into a bumbling idiot, and Kent emerges as a prime example of a best friend. Moore takes Lear, who frankly makes bad decisions and complains throughout the Shakespeare play, and puts that into the spotlight. Lear isn’t seen as King; He is viewed as a dotty, whiny, old man. This approach is daring and risky, but it ultimately pays off.

Catherine the Great, the new biography of the the famous empress of Russia written by Simon Dixon, is too short, too wordy, and too obsessed with minutiae ever to become a piece of interest outside of academic circles. The book is smoothly written and evocatively descriptive in its setting, but it fails at its most basic tasks of being a biography of a person, and of a ruler. While the intriguing setting is enough, almost in the same way that it can be with good fiction, momentarily to distract the reader from the book's flaws, it can never overcome its main faults, the greatest of which is that the book dwells on what surrounds Catherine throughout her life, without ever discussing Catherine herself.