Book Review: From Pompeii
/Pompeii and Herculaneum, the two most famous lost cities of the ancient world, had a long and vivid afterlife in culture and literature, as Ingrid Rowland's insightful new book describes
Read MoreMagic Prague!
/Our book today is Angelo Maria Ripellino’s utterly wonderful 1973 book Praga Magica, published in 1994 by Picador as Magic Prague, marvelously translated by David Newton Martinelli. It’s a forlorn love-song to the weird city of Prague, written in white heat at the height of Ripellino’s powers, and it’s as beautiful and sui generis a […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Fights on the Little Horn
/The darkly iconic Last Stand of George Armstrong Custer receives an exuberantly detailed new account
Read MoreThe Vanished Multitudes in the Penny Press!
/The May-June issue of Audubon has a cover story, “From Billions to None” by Barry Yeoman, that takes advantage of a centennial anniversary in its own way every bit as saddening as that of the opening of the First World War: the death in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 of Martha, the world’s last passenger […]
Read MoreBook Review: Destroying Angel
/In Nevada Barr's latest thriller, her indefatigable main character must track a group of hired killers through the wilderness in order to save their hostages
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Cold Dish!
/Our book today is 2005’s The Cold Dish, the first installment in Craig Johnson’s hugely successful series of mystery novels set in the fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming and starring laconic, leather-tough sheriff Walt Longmire and a terrifically engaging cast of supporting characters, from his long-time friend and Cheyenne saloon owner Henry Standing Bear to his […]
Read MoreBook Review: Hummingbirds
/The world's smallest and busiest birds are the subject of a pretty new book
Read MoreGeographica: Utah’s Dinosaurs!
/It’s a sad commentary on our relevance-obsessed and overcrowded society that the editorial Powers That Be at the National Geographic magazine probably didn’t hesitate for a moment before choosing the cover story for their May issue: the looming ecological crisis of mass-produced food supply. That article, by Jonathan Foley, is both fascinating and alarming … […]
Read MoreA Dark Song of Blood!
/Our book today is Ben Pastor’s A Dark Song of Blood, her third murder mystery starring Nazi Wehrmacht officer Martin Bora (the first two were Lumen and Liar Moon). The book is out now in a very sturdy paperback from Bitter Lemon Press, and it makes for a very absorbing – although very dark – […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Sea House
/In Elisabeth Gifford's impressive debut, two couples, separated by a century, each confront Scotland's legends of the seal-folk.
Read MoreBook Review: Strange Glory
/The famous clerical martyr to the Nazi regime is the subject of a powerful new biography
Read MoreBook Review: The Price of Silence
/The notorious Duke Lacrosse rape case - and its tawdry aftermath - is the subject of a veteran journalist's big new book
Read MoreBook Review: A Great & Wretched City
/A fascinating new book looks at the long political and historical writings of the author of "The Prince"
Read MoreBook Review: The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke
/A splendidly brainy new intellectual biography gives us the mind-life of the great orator, writer, and parliamentarian Edmund Burke
Read MoreJourney to the Land of the Flies!
/Our book today is Aldo Buzzi’s 1996 composite travel book Cechov a Sondrio e altri viaggi, brought out by Random House in a very good translation by Ann Goldstein and titled Journey to the Land of the Flies (poor Chekhov gets the heave-ho). Buzzi’s formal training was as an architect, but for most of his […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Annotated Northanger Abbey
/Jane Austen's posthumous send-up of Gothic novels (and their breathless readers) gets a lavish annotated edition
Read MoreAn April Book-Haul!
/As a reader who’s deeply interested in what other people – and especially young people – are reading and why, how could I not be fascinated by the teeming subset of YouTube known as BookTube? That’s the sprawling (and constantly growing) community of channels on YouTube devoted entirely to books – book reviews, book discussions, […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Medici Boy
/Through the eyes of an assistant, a new novel by an American master shows us the life and torturous loves of the great Renaissance artist Donatello
Read MoreMystery Monday: Death of the Duchess!
/Our book today is 1991’s Death of the Duchess by Elizabeth Eyre, which is a pseudonym for the London writing team of Jill Staynes and Magaret Storey (both of which sound more like pseudonyms than “Elizabeth Eyre,” but then, what would I know of pseudonyms?). Death of the Duchess is a murder mystery set in […]
Read MoreThe Three Edwards!
/Our book today is Thomas Costain’s magnificent 1958 volume The Three Edwards, the third in his “Pageant of England” series, this one centering on the reigns of Kings Edward I, II, and III and thus covering some of the most dramatic and vibrant years in English history. Costain – an old newspaperman from Canada who […]
Read More