Book Review: Montaigne
/An English-language translation of a monumental biography of the founder of modern essay form urges readers to remember the man, not the legend.
Read MoreBook Review: Secrets of Churchill's War Rooms
/Down below the sidewalks of London, a warren of secret rooms housed the war effort while bombs were falling on the city; a lavish new book tours the war rooms.
Read MoreBook Review: Three Days in January
/As a new book about Eisenhower and Kennedy makes clear, transitions of presidential power, especially between rival parties, have always been testy.
Read MoreBook Review: The House of the Dead
/Long before the Soviet gulag, Russian dissidents, criminals, and political exiles were sent to the vast frozen wasteland of Siberia. A grim new book tells their stories.
Read MoreBook Review: The Egyptians
/The Egyptian Revolution and its cataclysmic aftermath forms the subject of a riveting new book by a journalist and keen-eyed witness.
Read MoreThe Travels of Mark Twain!
/Our book today at first almost seems like a blasphemy: it’s The Travels of Mark Twain from 1961, and its seeming blasphemy comes from the fact that Charles Neider is its editor rather than its author. Rather than a work of history and analysis about Mark Twain’s extensive travels, as its title might indicate, it’s […]
Read MoreBook Review: Falling Ill
/From the late and much-honored poet CK Williams, one final work
Read MoreArtful Dodgers and Fartful Codgers in the Penny Press!
/I couldn’t help but be charmed by the long essay by Joseph Epstein in last week’s Weekly Standard, despite its barrage of annoying ticks and quirks. The piece is called “Hitting Eighty,” and it’s the latest (and – sad thought – the last?) in what turns out to be a little series of pieces Epstein […]
Read MoreBook Review: Making Faces
/The quintessential human feature - the large, expressive face - gets a thorough and fascinating scientific examination.
Read MoreComics: The Lure of the Artwork!
/The week’s comics reflected a very, very old pattern of mine: buying for artists rather than writers. It would be wrong to say that for most of my comics-buying life I cared much more about a title’s artwork than about its writing; far closer to the truth to say I didn’t care about the writing […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner
/The famed writer of "You Know Me Al" was also a life-long prolific deadline writer. An invaluable new book collects the journalism of Ring Lardner.
Read MoreBook Review: John Singer Sargent - Figures and Landscapes
/The magnificent catalogue from Yale University Press of the paintings and drawing of John Singer Sargent comes to its conclusion with volume IX
Read MoreThe Inevitable Guest!
/Our book today is The Inevitable Guest: A Survival Guide to Being Company & Having Company on Cape Cod, a spirited but ultimately hopeless 2000 book by Marcia Monbleau, writing from the hallowed precincts of Harwich Port. I took it down from its shelf in a perversely contrarian moment, since the book is about the […]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Percy Bysshe Shelley!
/Some Penguin Classics almost play tricks on your memory, you’re so certain you’ve seen them before in earlier editions. Surely, for instance, any sizable US Penguin Classics library going back a few decades will already have a big fat volume of Percy Bysshe Shelley? And yet no! When I first clapped eyes on the big, […]
Read MoreGraphic Novel Review: Son of Superman
/In the first story-arc in the newest era of the ultimate comic-book hero, a deadly enemy threatens the young son of Superman
Read MoreComics This Week: Three DC Classics!
/A crackerjack week at the comics shop here in Boston, and while I was reading and really enjoying the three new issues I bought at the Android’s Dungeon, I couldn’t help but notice that these are characters I’ve been reading about for a long, long time! I got the latest issues of three iconic superheroes, […]
Read MoreA Year with the Tudors II: “You Are My Grace”
/Jane Seymour is in many ways the most elusive of all the wives of King Henry VIII, dying just weeks after giving the king his longed-for male heir. A new novel delves into the human connection between Henry and his third wife.
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