“Cutting through decades of narrow or shallow reporting, Arthur Herman offers a balanced and elegant account which captures both Churchill’s generosity of spirit and Gandhi’s greatness of soul. While recognizing their faults, he shows what motivated them and made them great—with impressive research that in Churchill’s words leaves “no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked.” The last two chapters, and the author’s Conclusion, are alone worth the price of what must become the standard work on the subject.”

“The rivalry between Winston Churchill and Mohandas Gandhi could hardly have been played for higher stakes. The future of British India hung upon the outcome of their 20-year struggle…. As one might expect from the author of To Rule the Waves, a fine history … Mr. Herman has researched Gandhi & Churchill meticulously and written it fluently.”

“One of the most important books I have ever read.”

“Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist, and Vladimir Lenin, the illiberal totalitarian, hand-in-glove unwound the old nineteenth-century order and redefined war as an existential and global struggle over ideas—with disastrous twentieth-century results. In yet another well-written and fascinating dual biography, the prolific and insightful historian Arthur Herman shows how Wilson’s naive good intentions and Lenin’s deliberate ruthlessness nonetheless had the same pernicious effect of using the state to defy human nature. A fascinating and entirely original explanation of the American and Russian origins of the modern world.”

“Unfailingly evocative . . . close to an epic . . . More than a biography, it is a tale of a time in the past almost impossible to contemplate today as having taken place, with MacArthur himself as a figure perhaps too remote to understand, but all the more important to encounter.”

“Freedom’s Forge is the story of how the ingenuity and energy of the American private sector was turned loose to equip the finest military force on the face of the earth. In an era of gathering threats and shrinking defense budgets, it is a timely lesson told by one of the great historians of our time.”