It is a truth rarely acknowledged within the hallowed walls of university history departments that journalists often write better and more readable histories than professional academics. Too often, we specialists are mired in the weeds, reluctant to proffer anything other than the most nuanced, qualified conclusions about events and their consequences. By contrast, journalists—skilled in both archival research and evocative reportage—produce histories that translate complicated historical issues into engaging narratives that seek to show not just what happened but why the past is relevant and worth understanding. Unfortunately, this is not the case with investigative reporter Randall Sullivan’s The Devil’s Best Trick. Put bluntly—for there can be no sugar coating this—it is a poorly researched, critically uniformed, error-strewn mess.

Sullivan prefaces his work reflecting on his experiences as a war correspondent in Bosnia in 1995. There, in the shattered remains of Mostar, he recounts, he began to wonder how an...

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