Book Review: ADHD Nation
/A hard-hitting new book exposes the widespread misdiagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Read MoreThe Penguin Book of English Verse!
/Our book today is that saddest of all kinds of books, the superseded classic. In this case, we’re talking about The Penguin Book of English Verse – not the massive 2004 version edited in all its splendor by Paul Keegan but rather the 1956 version edited by John Hayward, who had the old-fashioned chutzpah to […]
Read MoreBook Review: August 1914
/Before the famous epic battles of the First World War, there were lesser-known but equally ferocious clashes that are often lost in the larger narrative. A short, powerful book seeks to redress that imbalance.
Read MoreBook Review: The World of Poldark
/The companion book to the 2015 production of "Poldark" turns out to be more than just a pretty face
Read MoreBook Review: Angelinetum and Other Poems
/Doctor and poet Giovanni Marrasio's verses receive an expert new edition from the Harvard's I Tatti Library series
Read MoreBirds Worth Knowing!
/Our book today is a pretty little gem unearthed from the bargain carts of my beloved Brattle Bookshop: the 1917 classic Birds Worth Knowing by the American author who wrote under the pen name Neltje Blanchan. This particular edition was issued in 1923 as part of the Little Nature Library put out by Doubleday, and […]
Read MoreBook Review: America's Snake
/Snake expert Ted Levin argues in his captivating new book that the American rattlesnake is as misunderstood as it is miraculous.
Read MoreInk Chorus: Bestseller!
/Our book today is surely one of the all-time classics of the Ink Chorus: Claud Cockburn’s 1972, er, bestseller Bestseller, in which our author subjects a dozen bygone bestselling novels to a forensic examination that’s both erudite and often hilarious, biting but also oddly sympathetic. He takes a tour through some of the bestselling novels […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Accidental Life
/Veteran editor Terry McDonell writes a ribald memoir that's half storytelling and half tips of the trade
Read MoreBook Review: The Fifty-Year Mission
/On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Star Trek gets a definitive oral history.
Read MoreGenteel Bloodletting in the Penny Press!
/I clearly wasn’t the only reader of the mighty TLS who was disappointed by Julian Baggini’s cover article about the ethics of eating animals! I went into the piece with high hopes, which in retrospect I see now was a bit foolish, and Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals felt the […]
Read MoreBook Review: Marked for Death
/A gritty and gripping new history tells the story of the dawn of aerial warfare.
Read MoreBook Review: The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko
/A crippled young man in a forgotten hospital has armored himself against the rotten hand he's drawn in life - until he falls in love with a new patient.
Read MoreThe Life of the Robin!
/Our book today is a wonderful little classic of popular natural history: David Lack’s The Life of the Robin from 1943, in which Lack takes everything known about robins from literature, poetry, and science and pulls it all together to craft a portrait-in-the-round of one of England’s most common birds. “Into the world of the […]
Read MoreBook Review: Ghost Talkers
/The heroine of Mary Robinette Kowal's enchanting new novel is doing her part for the WWI war effort - by debriefing the spirits of soldiers killed on the battlefield
Read MoreBook Review: The Nix
/The life of the main character in Nathan Hill's stunning debut novel is turned upside-down when the madwoman on the nightly news turns out to be his mother.
Read MoreBook Review: Dawn of the Dog
/A new book takes a revisionist look at the evolutionary history of the dog.
Read MoreBook Review: The Story of Egypt
/A new book tells the history of ancient Egypt, from the mists of pre-history to the familiar tale of Cleopatra
Read MoreBook Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction
/The latest entry in the epic "Year's Best Science Fiction" series by editor Gardner Dozois features everything from Venusian monsters to telepathic food - with stops along the way for planetary warfare, quantum piracy, and the end of the world as we know it.
Read MoreInk Chorus: Homage to Daniel Shays!
/Our book today is a clear, clean classic showing hardly any sign of floorboard decay, a good example of stages in a literary hack’s via dolorosa from griping underdog to griping Grand Dame: it’s Homage to Daniel Shays, Gore Vidal’s smashingly good 1972 volume collecting essays and book reviews from a neat 20-year span, from […]
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