Book Reivew: Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War
/Max Planck, the great physicist and father of quantum theory, gets a marvelous and empathetic new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator
/A new biography takes advantage of recently-opened Soviet archives
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Catullus!
/Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted here at Stevereads a few times in the past, take on a life of their own as translations even when the larger currents of social understanding and the craft of translation have moved on. I was reminded of this just the other day when I encountered a slightly battered […]
Read MoreBook Review: Infamy
/In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States summarily imprisoned thousands of its Japanese citizens for the duration of the war. Richard Reeves' passionate new book tells the story
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Doll Maker!
/Our book today is The Doll Maker by Richard Montanari (from Mulholland Books), that author’s eight installment in his series of police procedurals set among the mean streets of present-day Philadelphia and starring grizzled police detective Kevin Byrne and his younger, smarter partner Jessica Balzano. This latest adventure opens in a typically gripping fashion, with […]
Read MoreBook Review: In These Times
/Jenny Uglow's new book goes into lively detail about how ordinary people in Britain experienced the cataclysmic events of the wars of the Napoleonic era
Read MorePleasure by the Busload!
/Our book today is Pleasure by the Busload, a brimmingly delightful work of travel-writing done by Emily Kimbrough in 1961, with whimsical line-drawings by Mircea Vasilu. Kimbrough was famous at the time as one-half of the writing team (along with Cornelia Otis Skinner) of the best-selling 1942 book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, and […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer
/Author Thom Hatch promises mind-blowing new revelations in his book on the Battle of Little Bighorn. And in other news, Rutherford B. Hayes is rumored to be contemplating a run for president.
Read MoreIn Paperback: Saved by the Sea
/In his moving account, now in paperback from New World Library, David Helvarg recounts the wonders and wealth of the world's oceans
Read MoreBook Review: Of Noble Family
/Mary Robinette Kowal's sparkling "Glamourist" fantasy series comes to a complex and intriguing conclusion
Read MoreRomance Round-up: April 24, 2015!
/As I ruffled through the stacks of new romance novels on my shelf, still stung by lingering accusations that I unthinkingly favor historicals over other sub-genres, I assembled three new titles that have no historical aspirations at all. These three novels feature iPads, laptops, semi-automatic weapons, and lots and lots of motorcycles, but as I […]
Read MoreBook Review: Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature
/Cuckoos use other species of birds to raise the young they abandon, and they've been doing it for thousands of years without getting arrested. An absorbing new book isn't precisely rooting for them, but still ...
Read MoreBook Review: The Intimate Bond
/An extremely winning new book explores the enormous ways eight particular animal kinds have altered the course of human life on Earth
Read MoreBook Review: Dead Wake
/One hundred years ago, a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania, with grievous loss of civilian life. The anniversary is observed by one of our best popular historians
Read MoreBook Review: Princes at War
/A chatty, vivacious new book tracks the four sons of the Royal House of Windsor during the years of World War Two
Read MoreComics! Bottom’s Up in the Legion!
/DC’s company-wide event “Convergence” continues, in which long-abandoned incarnations of their super-characters are temporarily given current issues again, in a kind of multi-part gift to the company’s older, more nostalgic readers. As a result, today’s trip to Boston’s wonderful Comicopia seemed like a flashback to visiting the same twenty or thirty years ago. Longer than […]
Read MoreInk Chorus: Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading!
/Our book today is Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, a thoroughly delightful bookish 2005 memoir written by long-time NPR book critic and Washington Post mystery-novel columnist Maureen Corrigan. The book is sub-titled “Finding and Losing Myself in Books,” and if ever a sub-title was fully earned, this one is. The thing is equal parts autobiography, […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: Strange Loyalties!
/Our book today is William McIlvanney’s Strange Loyalties (not, as the last couple of “Mystery Mondays” might lead you to believe, Strange Loyalties … of the Dead!), the third murder mystery novels to feature Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw, who stalks the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow and is routinely referred to by his superiors on […]
Read MoreBook Review: Fortune's Fool
/The latest full-dress biography of John Wilkes Booth seeks to get at the flesh-and-blood man beneath the monster
Read MoreBook Review: The Dream Lover
/The passionate, unconventional life of novelist George Sand forms the backdrop for Elizabeth Berg's new novel
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