Reading Chernow's biography of Washington. It's been a pure joy and I only have a hundred or so pages to go. As the first real biography I've gotten into as an adult, I hope they're all this engaging.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.

About 1/4 done and if you enjoy Post WW2 and Cold War era, then yes, I would recommend.

Through the eye of the a needle by Peter Brown, subtitled "Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West 350 - 550", which is much more engrossing than I expected. If anything its style is a bit too florid and exciting for its subject matter! The author seems to have a broad familiarity with the historical context he's dealing with and sets up some wide generalities about the Western Empire before zooming in on the specific perspectives of a few well-documented notable personages in a somewhat generational fashion; so far he's featured Symmachus, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, Paulinus, and Ausonius. I'd definitely recommend it, it's been full of all sorts of interesting minutiae and novel perspectives. By examining very closely the overlapping and melding borders of the "Pagan" Roman society and the growing cult of Christ as they interacted in a social landscape dominated by wealth and the economics of empire, the author illuminates a fascinating range of ideas in a period that has, at least in my reading, typically been ignored by the alternating biases of classicists (for whom everything past the crises of the 3rd century seems relegated to darkness) and Christians (who often prefer to gloss over their early institutional origins).

The only criticisms I have so far are that 1) the first few chapters are broad enough to be a bit intimidating and I have no idea how substantiated some of his sweeping claims are, and 2) when he delves briefly into Augustine's Manichaean period, his description of Manichaeism is a bit one-dimensional - that's understandable however, since he's approaching it from Augustine's self-stated experiences with the sect, which were apparently unfulfilling and doubtlessly flavored by the religio-political trends of his later life.