Book Review: American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan
/American senator, author, and statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan's complex and constantly-evolving political philosophy is the subject of a pointed new book
Read MoreJourney Into Summer!
/Our books today are testaments to hope: Edwin Way Teale’s 1951 North with the Spring and his 1960 Journey into Summer. In both books, Teale and his wife Nellie make an unorthodox and brilliant decision: rather than stay home and experience all the nuances of the seasons on their own immediate area, they follow the […]
Read MoreBook Review: Washington's Circle
/A fantastic new book tells the story of President Washington and the extraordinary team he assembled to form the new nation's first administration
Read MoreMystery Monday: Dry Bones in the Valley!
/Our book today is a lean, moody debut mystery novel, Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman, and it’s the latest in an ominously popular new sub-sub-genre, “rural noir”: dark and sordid murder-and-violence plot lines taking place not in far-flung exotic locales but rather just forty miles off the interstate, in the most depressed […]
Read MoreThe Green Dragoon!
/Our book today is The Green Dragoon, a 1957 book by Robert Bass, and it illustrates a very good impromptu rule of book-buying: never pass up a book with a title like The Green Dragoon. This particular Green Dragoon is about Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who commanded the so-called British Legion during the American Revolution […]
Read MoreBook Review: Galileo's Telescope
/One little spyglass - only four fingers long - changed the world; a sparkling new book tells the story of Galileo's "recounting of the stars"
Read MoreBook Review: Ravensbruck
/In 1939 the Nazis established their only concentration camp specifically for women; a comprehensive new book tells the history of Ravensbruck
Read MoreYours Ever!
/Our book today is Thomas Mallon’s 2009 love-letter to letters, Yours Ever, and it was brought to my mind by the sudden realization that I myself am now finished with postal correspondence. A good friend of mine, a little old lady who reviews the same novel every week for the Silver Spring Scold, has moved […]
Read MoreBook Review: We All Looked Up
/The high school students in Tommy Wallach's fantastic debut face more than graduation and an uncertain job market: they face an honest-to-gosh killer asteroid
Read MoreInk Chorus: Days of Reading!
/Our book today is a pretty little thing from the Penguin “Great Ideas” series, Days of Reading by Marcel Proust, here translated and abridged and pasted together by John Sturrock back in 1988. These “Great Ideas” volumes wonderfully relished in the narrow focus: a few essays, a few excerpts along key themes, and they were […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Big Trial
/From Lizzie Borden to O. J. Simpson, big public show-trials have fascinated the American people. In his new book, renowned legal historian Lawrence Friedman tries to dissect why that is.
Read MoreRome for Ourselves!
/Our book today is a charmer from the coffee tables of yesteryear: it’s Rome for Ourselves by Aubrey Menen, a delightful, highly personal 1960 look at the history of the Eternal City, written by one of its most remarkable citizens at the time. Menen was born in London in 1912, the son of an Indian […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Architect's Apprentice
/A young boy and his gorgeous white elephant become apprenticed to the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire in this stunning new novel by the author of "The Bastard of Istanbul"
Read MoreBook Review: On Elizabeth Bishop
/In the latest Princeton "Writers on Writers" installment, novelist Colm Toibin writes about poet Elizabeth Bishop
Read MoreBook Review: Duplicity
/In N. K. Traver's exciting debut, a young cyber-hacker finds his life steadily being commandeered - but his own reflection in the mirror.
Read MoreThe Second Stevereads Book Outlet Box-Haul!
/Our books today are the proceeds from my latest Book Outlet haul, done in my ongoing pining hopes of someday being cool enough to be on BookTube, where such hauls are a standard part of the landscape! Even this early in my association with the site, my shopping has developed certain rules: first, the price […]
Read MoreBook Review: Notes from a Dead House
/Dostoevsky's great semi-fictionalized prison memoir gets a sterling new translation from the superstar team of Pevear and Volokhonsky
Read MoreBook Review: Young Eliot
/A lavishly-detailed new biography shows us Thomas Stearns Eliot in his slightly fussy, slightly feckless pre-fame years
Read MoreBook Review: The Fortunes of Francis Barber
/One of the only two people at the deathbed of Samuel Johnson was a young ex-slave to whom Johnson was, in his testy way, devoted. A new book finally gives Francis Barber the biography he's always deserved
Read MoreSupergirl!
/Our book today is the 2007 Supergirl volume of DC Comics’ “Showcase Presents,” which was brought to my mind by the recent announcement of a live-action WB TV “Supergirl” series coming up soon, starring a pleasant-faced young woman named Melissa Benoist (and also starring, in a bit of a casting coup, Dean Cain, who played […]
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