Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
I’ve often been asked – indeed, I often ask myself – why on Earth I’d continue to read a magazine as politically zealous, not to say crackpot, as the National Review, and my answer – given a few times even here on Stevereads – is that I try my best to ignore the frong half […]
Read MoreA slim picaresque novel that was a runaway bestseller in France gets a stylish English-language translation
Read MoreFrom the Puritans and their city on a hill to the Mormons to modern-day charlatans, the story of the United States is the story of competing faiths; a lively new book looks at that complicated tapestry
Read MoreOur book today is a squat, brick-red little triple-decker, the three-volume life of Henry VIII that Everyman editor W. Llweleyn Williams carved out of 12-volume history of England written from 1856 to 1870 by the great J. A. Froude. Williams knew what he was about; Froude’s book – the unabridged edition of which is out […]
Read MoreAn environmentalist writes an energetic and - despite everything - optimistic clarion call to better and smarter thinking about how mankind can ease its disastrous impact on nature
Read MoreIn 1950 a prominent Western nuclear physicist disappeared - and re-surfaced years later in the Soviet Union, helping the Russians to develop their atomic arsenal. A gripping new book tells the story of a traitor who was also a genius
Read MoreRevolutionary Russian choreographer Leonid Yakobson fought prejudice, rivals, and the omnipresent Soviet censors to pursue his art, as a magnificent new book narrates
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are updates or revisions of things that were themselves already classics, and that can be nerve-racking for a long-time fan of the Penguin line such as myself. I love the ongoing march of new editions, don’t get me wrong – I’m always the first person telling my bookish friends that some new […]
Read MoreA true believer in the tenets of Darwinism in the 19th Century goes on what amounts to a pilgrimage to that great Darwinian destination, the Galapagos Islands, in James Morrow's glowing new novel
Read MoreSome days in the Penny Press are more frustrating than others, of course, and sometimes those weeks offer clear signals of their intent to get my knickers in a twist. This happened just yesterday, in fact, when I took my first clear look at Barry Blitt’s imbecilic cover to the 26 January New Yorker, which […]
Read MoreWorld after world detected by powerful long-range telescopes are being shown to possess oceans - probably radically different from those of Earth; a new book looks at water worlds, our own and others
Read MoreI ventured to the comics shop again this week, lured by the prospect of interesting new graphic novel collections (there weren’t any that I could see), and I walked out with two new Marvel comics, Avengers #40, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Stefano Caselli, and Fantastic Four #642, written by James Robinson and […]
Read MoreOnly one man can possibly save a plague- and fire-stricken sub that's burning and adrift at the top of the world ...
Read MoreWhen young Promise's family is killed on their peaceful frontier planet, she signs up with the space-Marines - as one tends to do in such circumstances
Read MoreOne item of book news today is something you’ll all likely have seen: as the second book in his online book club, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has chosen Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which Pinker lays out his biggest, most dip-shitty counter-intuitive flap-doodle ever and waits patiently for […]
Read MoreWhen states engage in corruption - and condone it in other states - they fuel exactly the kind of tensions that, short of war, are the only things that can threaten those states; a stunning new book examines the kinetics of wrongdoing
Read MoreLast week I naturally succumbed to the hoopla and bought the first issue of Marvel Comics’ new “Star Wars” comic book (my comics-related posts here on Stevereads really do need to be closer to Wednesday – which, for all you non-virgins out there, is New Comics Day here in Boston – and I’ll work on […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Dogs of Rome, Conor Fitzgerald’s 2010 debut mystery novel starring Commissario Alec Blume, who was born and raised in America but who, 17 years ago, lost his parents to the gunfire of a violent bank robbery while visiting Rome. A grief-stricken young Blume joined the police force instead of returning […]
Read MoreThe legendary fantasy author Michael Moorcock returns after a long absence to the genre he helped to create
Read MoreA nimble and tremendously engaging history of the Middle Ages finally gets translated into English
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.