Book Review: The Leviathan Effect
/A enormous storm is bearing down on Washington D.C., and the President and his staff are confronted with a group of people who say they can stop the hurricane - for a price
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia!
/Some Penguin Classics seem to come along at just the right time – actually a great many of them do, but this time was just right for Maurice Evans’ wonderful 1977 edition of that lost, sparkling diamond-mine of English literature, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The Arcadia got its start in the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Blood Sisters
/Sarah Gristwood (author of the utterly delightful "Arbella: England's Lost Queen") charts the triumphs and tragedies of the seven key women in the Wars of the Roses
Read MoreBook Review: The Average American Marriage
/The horny, feckless narrator of Kultgen's "The Average American Male" returns: married, with kids - and, of course, lusting after a co-worker
Read MoreThe Rest of the Redesign in the Penny Press!
/Which isn’t to say that issue of The New Republic had only one noteworthy item – far from it! I confess, I was worried after the first issue of the redesign. I knew TNR had been bought by a 15-year-old Internet gazillionaire, and I naturally assumed that could never be a good thing. I envisioned [...]
Read MoreA Tired Pilgrim in the Penny Press!
/Novelist Ian McEwan writes a deliberately provocative little squib for the newly-redesigned New Republic (disastrously redesigned as well – it disappears on the newsstand, especially this current issue, which for no particular reason has no cover illustration, just the boring new logo on a field of white), something called “The God That Fails” and sub-titled [...]
Read MoreComics: Marvel First - WWII Superheroes
/The Angel - the Silver Scorpion - the Destroyer - the Black Marvel - the Blazing Skull: not exactly household names today, but in the dark days of World War II, they fought the forces of evil for the entertainment of a new kind of reader: comic book fans
Read MoreBook Review: A Great and Monstrous Thing
/"Houses, Churches, mix'd together - Streets, unpleasant in all Weather" - so wrote the poet about resolute, dissolute London, whose 18th century excesses are the subject of a grand new book
Read MoreBook Review: How Literature Saved My Life
/David Shields, author of the 'manifesto' "Reality Hunger," is still unhappy with boring old books. In fact, he's still writing books about how unhappy he is.
Read MoreBook Review: A Week in Winter
/Unsure of what to do with her life, a woman turns an old stone house into an inn on the coast of Ireland, and strangers begin to gather ...
Read MoreBook Review: I Will Have Vengeance
/In 1931 Naples, Commissario Ricciardi pursues the most desperate of criminals, driven by an absolute commitment to justice - and helped by a gift he alone possesses.
Read MoreBook Review: The Aviator's Wife
/A new novel tells the story of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, famous author and wife of an even more famous jerk.
Read MoreBook Review: Europe Before Rome
/A profusely illustrated you-are-there look at the excavations into European prehistory
Read MoreBook Review: Furies
/The Italian Renaissance of Michelangelo and Raphael was built by - and traumatized by - the constant tramping of hired armies. A provocative new study looks at the birth-price of the modern era
Read MoreSix for the Regicide!
/Avunculicide would be just as accurate, since of course we’re referring to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who in 1483 became King of England after having disposed of the niggling little obstacle of the previous king of England, 14-year-old Edward V, who’d become king upon the death of his father, Edward IV, Richard’s brother. Young Edward [...]
Read MoreThird-Act Stumbling in the Penny Press!
/It was a decidedly non-literary day at Ye Olde PO Box: no Arion, no TLS, no London Review of Books, no New York Review of Books … not even the New York Times Book Review to further the ongoing necessary inquiry. Instead, almost as a warning of the lower elevations head, there was a new issue [...]
Read MoreThe Illustrious Prince!
/Our book today is E. Phillips Oppenheim’s 1910 thriller, The Illustrious Prince, which opens right away, on Page 1, with an inadvertent thrill delivered right over the heads of its contemporary readers and right to the reading cortex of its 21st Century audience. In the opening scene, a luxury liner has missed its evening tide [...]
Read MoreClassics Reissued: West with the Night
/The great travel-adventure classic gets a pretty new reprint
Read MoreBook Review: Ways of Going Home
/The newest novel from the newest Chilean literary wunderkind
Read MoreBook Review: Engineers of Victory
/A new history of the Second World War focuses on the mid-level thinkers and technicians whose innovations made the grand strategies work
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