Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
As I’ve noted in the past here at Stevereads, I take a peculiar interest in the slight but often fascinating book-coverage you can find in the “lad mags” like Esquire or Men’s Journal or GQ. It’s always strange to me, the efforts the editors of these magazines (arrogant SOBs almost to a man) to find […]
Read MoreThe heroic efforts to save the lives of the black rhinos of Zimbabwe are at the heart of a thrilling new book
Read MoreI ventured into the comics shop recently, which is something I don’t do all that often anymore, for two main reasons: first, as I’ve lamented several times here at Stevereads, the bloom of most comics went off the rose for me a few years ago when DC Comics – the mainstay of my comics world […]
Read MoreOur book today is a doozy from 2010: it’s the 75th Anniversary Poster Book of DC Comics, a lavishly oversized thing put out by the good folks at Quirk Books in honor, as its title hints, of the 75th anniversary of DC Comics and its venerable roster of comic book characters (the three most recognizably […]
Read MoreA new history takes a thought-provokingly centralist look at the oft-chronicled Habsburg Empire
Read MoreOur book today is a little treasure from 1920, Cape Coddities by Dennis and Marion Chatham, dotted all throughout with charming little spot illustrations by Harold Cue. I’ve been pulling this little volume down off the shelf every year when Spring first begins to unfold in Boston; the song-birds come back to the lawns and […]
Read MoreA noted feminist social critic looks back on her long friendship with the great Betty Friedan.
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted before here at Stevereads, are genuinely impressive works of scholarship in their own right, and I recently came across one of those during a foray at the Brattle Bookshop: The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, edited by David Norbook – in this case, the 2005 update to the 1992 […]
Read MoreA fascinating new book presents readers with a bounty of stories surrounding the daily intelligence-services briefing given to US Presidents
Read MoreAn invigorating new study of the real presence of the divine in the mundane workings of organized religion
Read MoreThe latest volume from deceptively erudite Australian poet Les Murray
Read MoreAmerica's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay gets an elegant new Selected Poems volume
Read MoreOur book today is The Lady with the Borzoi, a biographical tribute to Blanche Knopf that somehow feels both surprising and long overdue. The book, written with grace and a cheery volubility by Laura Claridge, is the story of Blanche Knopf, the so-called “soul” of the publishing house she created a century ago with her […]
Read MoreAbandoned by the West and battered by the Islamic caliphate, the eastern Roman Empire shrank and withdrew but did not fall - a new history asks why
Read MoreOur book today is Classical Literature: An Epic Journey from Homer to Virgil and Beyond by emeritus Oxford don Richard Jenkyns. The book is an alarmingly thin perambulation through the whole of the classics from the Homeric era through the Augustan Age and a little bit beyond, a hurried tour that’s saved from being a […]
Read MoreWhen smallpox struck the city of Boston in 1721, battle lines were drawn over how to deal with it - and strange alliances formed
Read MoreOur book today is the latest from the prolific Paul Strathern: The Medici, subtitled somewhat predictably “Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance.” And the subtitle is hardly the only thing in the book that’s predictable; after all, G. F. Young did this kind of tour d’horizon over a century ago, laying out the […]
Read MoreAt the center of a lively, personality-driven new book about the twelfth century is the contentious family of King Henry II
Read MoreOur book today is The Edge of Empire: A Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall, an utterly winning and somewhat old-fashioned work by Bronwen Riley in which she imagines a sprawling travel itinerary of Antonine Rome through a narrative device that was once familiar in popular histories of ancient Rome, […]
Read MoreA lovely new volume offers a selection of Henry David Thoreau's heartfelt writings about flowers
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.