Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our story today is an oldie from the halcyon days of 1974, when a United States increasingly mired in the Watergate scandal got some much-needed distraction by turning to the pages of Marvel Comics for the comics event of the year (if you don’t count the first appearances of both the Punisher and Wolverine – […]
Read MoreMore and more information bombards us every day in what seems like an unbeatable torrent - and a new book attempts to separate the signal from the noise and help its readers to do a little mental triage
Read MoreBack in the heyday of pre-reboot "Star Trek," Captain Kirk and his crew had countless adventures - but what about all the other starships in the fleet? Didn't any of them have adventures?
Read MoreFor centuries, the Confessions of Saint Augustine has been considered one of the greatest spiritual autobiographies ever written; the text's first eight chapters gets a new translation in the venerable Loeb Classical Library
Read MoreOur books today are two unconventional little hand-sized guidebooks to the marvellous city of Venice, 1966′s very popular and often-reprinted classic Venice for Pleasure by J. G. Links and Another Venice from the year 2000 by Jacopo Fasolo. Of course these two books are two little bits on a towering heap of Venice guidebooks – […]
Read More2014 marks the sad centenary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, whose vast flocks had once darkened the skies of a young America; a new book sounds out the messages of that melancholy anniversary
Read MoreLord Byron's personal physician was a prolific writer in his own right, and he's the subject of a pleasingly lurid new account
Read MoreIt’s been two blessed years since the New York Review of Books reprinted John Williams’s flatulently boring 1965 novel Stoner and the presumably bored grandees of the book-chat world surprised all rational people by taking it up as some sort of lost classic and singing its praises from every literary pulpit in the English-speaking world. […]
Read MoreOur book today is a gorgeous 1974 Thames & Hudson volume called The English Country House: an art and a way of life, written by Olive Cook with loads of great photos by A. F. Kersting. The book has one of the most interesting and charming subjects of them all to examine, and it opens […]
Read MoreA sweeping new history looks back half a century to the only wartime use of atomic weapons
Read MorePresident Nixon secretly tape-recorded his White House conversations for years - it was a habit that would help to destroy his administration, but before it did that, it created a huge archive of recorded conversations, which form the underpinning of a big new book
Read MoreLeonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world - but who was the young woman in the painting? A new book narrates the life of the best-known face of them all.
Read MoreOur book today is another recent Brattle find: Enrico Dandolo & The Rise of Venice, a 2003 study of medieval Venice (and its most remarkable citizen, whose life spanned almost the whole of the twelfth century) by Thomas Madden, who has a wonderful way of scraping away the romantic veneer of post-Renaissance Venice and showing […]
Read MoreBest-selling historian Hampton Sides takes as the subject of his new book a brave and failed 19th-century Arctic expedition
Read MoreOur book today is an oversized ‘coffee table’ treat, Vincenzo Labella’s lavishly illustrated 1990 tour of the Italian Renaissance, A Season of Giants, 1492-1508: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael. Labella claims right from the start that his book centers on three titanic artistic geniuses of the period, and when it comes to those three, our author never […]
Read MoreA massive new biography chronicles the fascinating life of one of the greatest composers of all time
Read MoreOur book today is By My Hand, the new Commissario Ricciardi mystery by Maurizio DeGiovanni – a richly textured and enormously enjoyable series starring a morose young police detective in 1930s Naples who, since his childhood, has had a gift – or, from his own viewpoint, suffered under a curse – that helps him in […]
Read MoreMy last experience with the every-other-month Boston Public Library books sale was so pleasing – not just the sight of lots of enthusiastic young people eagerly browsing the books but also a near-complete paperback set of Patrick O’Brian’s magnificent series of Aubrey/Maturin novels – that I hardly hesitated this morning to make the short trip […]
Read MoreA fascinating debut collection of short stories set in modern China
Read MoreOur book today is Saladin, the great 2008 biography by Director of Research at Paris’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Anne-Marie Edde, now at last available in a sturdy paperback in an English-language translation by Jane Marie Todd. And although six years is a disgracefully long gap between French intellectual curiosity and American intellectual […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.
