Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is A Face Turned Backward, the 1999 second installment in Lauren Haney’s delightful series of murder mysteries set in ancient Egypt and featuring stalwart (and easy on the eyes) Lieutenant Bak, commander of the Medjay police force in the frontier town of Buhen during the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. The book’s […]
Read MoreDiplomat, author, congresswoman, power broker, playwright - Clare Boothe Luce crammed an enormous amount of living into her life, and the concluding volume of Sylvia Jukes Morris's essential biography gives it all the sparkling narration it deserves
Read MoreA generous new collection of essays by the legendary Joseph Epstein
Read MoreJohn Anderson Winn's thumpingly good new book studies the life and reign of Queen Anne through the least likely focus of them all - and succeeds wonderfully on all counts
Read MoreOne of the hard-chancing successors of Alexander the Great grabbed most of Asia when Alexander died - and then that successor and his successors worked desperately hard to hold onto it all
Read MoreIt’s always a thing I feel a little bit ashamed to admit, but there it is: I go to comic books mainly for their artwork. I know all about the brilliance of today’s comics writing – I hear about it all the time from comics aficionados, that today’s industry writers are smarter and more literate […]
Read MoreThe super-villain glimpsed at the end of the mega-hit "Avengers" movie casts a long shadow in the comic books where he was born - a new Marvel Comics graphic novel fills in some of the blanks
Read MoreA debut novel follows a charismatic young man's partying days from New Jersey all the way to Scotland and back and charts his downfall as well
Read MoreThe entire vast and vivid history of Egypt is outlined to the reader as Toby Wilkinson's charming new book makes its way down the Nile
Read MoreThe 1967 episode of the original Star Trek TV series “The City on the Edge of Forever” comes up almost necessarily in any discussion of the franchise as a whole. Fans routinely rank it as one of the best episodes of the original series, and a smaller sub-set of those fans, myself included, maintain that […]
Read MoreThe complicated history of the American Revolution gets its best examination in a generation in Thomas Slaughter's new book
Read MoreThe young author of "The Red Badge of Courage" is the subject of a lively and very readable new biography
Read MorePopular writer Martin Dugard offers a new book about history's great explorers, men and women who thought outside the box, pushed the envelope, lived every day as if it were their last, ate their vegetables, and voted three times for Ronald Reagan
Read MoreIn 1571 the Christian West and the Muslim East clashed in an epic sea-battle, and when it was over, painters, writers, and poets echoed it in their works. The latest I Tatti volume collects a bounty of those responses
Read MoreTwo friends flee famine-parched Ireland for opposite ends of the world in this big new historical novel
Read MoreA man adopts a smart, fussy owl - and the relationship completely changes his life
Read MoreA good many of you responded favorably to that last “Six for the Scribblers” writer-biography round-up (and some of you pointed out that the entry didn’t, in fact, include six biographies but instead only five, against which my only lame defense is to note that this is “Stevereads” not “Stevecounts”), and since there are EVER […]
Read MoreA luminous - and enormous - new account of the novel's colorful history takes readers on a fun and fast-paced tour of fiction from Fielding to Diaz, with innumerable stops in between
Read MoreEven in its truncated US edition, Richard Overy's great new history of aerial bombing during WWII has much to offer its readers
Read MoreOur book today is Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1958 historical novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which made as much of a splash as any book could reasonably be expected to make. It sold briskly (thanks to an innovatively energetic ad campaign); it garnered an enviable collection of critical praise (The New York Times called it […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.