Book Review: Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet
/A smart and rewarding new biography seeks to portray the very human man underneath the multilayered legend of Martin Luther.
Read MoreBook Review: The Imagineers of War
/For decades, the weirdos and shaggy-haired mad-genius inventors of DARPA have toiled in well-funded obscurity; a new book uses recently-declassified material to tell their story.
Read MoreBook Review: Fallen Glory
/A lavishly-produced new book details humanity's long love-hate relationship with some of its most famous and iconic buildings.
Read MoreA Bittersweet New Era in the Penny Press!
/The latest issue of The New York Review of Books arrived on my doorstep last week, and it quickly became the saddest issue of the NYRB I’ve ever read – because this was the first issue I read after the death of the journal’s legendary editor, Bob Silvers. He’d been there from the beginning, and […]
Read MoreBook Review: A History of Ancient Egypt from the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom
/The author's multi-volume history of Ancient Egypt now reaches the high points of that culture's power and refinement.
Read MoreBook Review: Carnivore Minds
/Sharks, bears, rattlesnakes ... these and other infamous apex carnivores long considered mindless killing machines are given a fresh and nuanced re-examination in G. A. Bradshaw's new book.
Read MoreBook Review: The New Neotropical Companion
/A classic nature guide gets an elaborate, beautiful update.
Read MoreComics! Big Red Guys in Capes!
/Both DC and Marvel Comics have always had their flagship Big Guy in a Red Cape – with DC it’s of course been Superman, the strongest and most powerful of all the DC superheroes, and with Marvel it’s been the thunder god Thor, the Asgardian warrior-god sojourning on Earth and adventuring with Earth’s superheroes. And […]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Book of Magic
/Some Penguin Classics have to walk a very fine line in order to exist at all. Not all of them manage it, of course: there’s been no Penguin Classic of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, nor will there ever be, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a Penguin Classic reprint of My Life and Loves, or a nice […]
Read MoreBook Review: Swimmer Among the Stars
/Islands of bright, fable-spinning whimsy dot the debut collection of Kanishk Tharoor
Read MoreBook Review: The Weight of This World
/The sudden death of their drug dealer sends two backwoods friends into a spiral of greed and violence in the new novel from David Joy.
Read MoreBook Review: Spaceman of Bohemia
/A lone Czech astronaut on a deep-space mission confronts his past and his fears in this taut, memorable debut novel
Read MoreBook Review: In This Grave Hour
/Even the declaration of war with Germany doesn't stop mysteries from arriving at the doorstep of the indefatigable Maisie Dobbs.
Read MoreA Trio of Springlike Romances!
/Our books today are a trio of delights from the good folks at Avon Books, and they come at just the right moment: despite the calendar showing a mid-March date, and despite Springlike temperatures only a few days ago, a monstrous blizzard is grinding its way toward Boston at this moment, threatening to bury budding […]
Read MoreBook Review: Sex and the Constitution
/A richly rewarding new book narrates the long and complicated history of the American quest for - and fight against - life, liberty, and the pursuit of sex.
Read MoreBook Review: A Rabble of Dead Money
/Long before the Great Recession shook the modern world to its financial foundations, there was the Great Depression, the subject of a gripping new history.
Read MoreThe Everglades: River of Grass!
/Our book today is a towering classic of ecological literature: The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the book she wrote in 1947 in protest to a whole slate of proposed (and encroaching) drainage and construction projects designed to “improve” the vast waterlands of the Everglades. Douglas was a pint-sized force of nature, […]
Read MoreBook Review: Cnut the Great
/A taut, gripping new biography presents the life of the great warlord-monarch King Cnut
Read MoreBook Review: Clement Attlee
/A boisterous new biography re-examines the life and legacy of the enigmatic British Prime Minister and Labor leader Clement Attlee
Read MoreBedtime for Yeti!
/Our book today is Brazilian illustrator Vin Vogel’s follow-up to his 2015 classic The Thing About Yetis – joyful news to those of us who loved that book and its roly-poly head-tufted version of the famed Himalayan snow-man. The new book from Penguin’s Dial Books imprint is called BedTime for Yeti, and it opens by […]
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