Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
The hands-down winner for Most Obnoxious Opening Paragraph for a Book Review This Week goes to New Criterion editor and publisher Roger Kimball, reviewing Christopher Buckley’s new essay collection But Enough About You in the National Review: I’d known for years that Christopher Buckley was an amusing man. His novel Thank You for Smoking (1994), […]
Read MoreA stunning portrait of a people driven by fear and then consumed by hate
Read MoreA modern classic - now in an English-language translation - examines the roots of prewar German anti-Semitism
Read MoreRemembering stories about the Holocaust shades into inventing stories about the Holocaust in Boris Fishman's fantastic debut
Read MoreA mother in Colorado, grieving for her young son, confronts the fact that he might have been leading a life she never imagined
Read MoreA reclusive young woman meets a high-spirited blind girl whose enthusiasm for life opens a new world
Read MoreA rip-snorting new Penguin Classic gives us the memoir of a teenager who flew fighter planes during World War I
Read MoreOur book today is Medicus, the 2006 debut Roman murder mystery by Ruth Downie starring wry, brooding medical man Gaius Petreius Ruso, who’s chosen, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness, to respond to the death of his father and a painful divorce back in Rome by moving to the farthest reach of the Empire, distant Britannia, and […]
Read MoreDauntless mosaic-layer Libertus returns for another side-job of crime-solving in Rosemary Rowe's latest gripping murder mystery set in Roman Britain
Read MoreOur books today are two oldies but goodies, A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (1909) and A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927) by J. Wright Duff, who labored over them for a huge chunk of his life and […]
Read MoreA controversial author's latest and most devastating indictment of Israel's policies toward its Palestinian citizens and neighbors
Read MoreA lavishly-illustrated guide book to the bumble bees of North America, in all their busy glory
Read MoreNaturally, Scott Sherman’s well-done article in The Nation on the parlous state of the university press grabbed my attention. Sherman writes about the roughly 100 university presses in the United States but concentrates especially on the vast majority of them that don’t rest on “the feathery cushion of an endowment” but rather face the hurly-burly […]
Read MoreThe life and great loves of a legendary 1920s mountain-climber reach out from the past to grab the life of a young 1990s man in Justin Go's hugely ambitious debut novel
Read MoreOur book today is a delightful curiosity called Genji Days by Edward Seidenseticker, whose 1976 translation of Murakami Shikibu’s great epic novel The Tale of Genji was as thoroughly the definitive Genji of his generation as Arthur Waley’s had been for the previous generation – or, indeed, Royall Tyler’s 2001 version is currently. For thousands […]
Read MoreOur book today is Stan Cutler’s 1994 mystery novel Shot on Location, a snapping-good Hollywood whodunit starring the unlikely duo of fifty-something “fixer” tough guy Rayford Goodman and twenty-something gay writer Mark Bradley – a duo who might never have met each other except that Mark Bradley’s seedy publisher, Pendragon Press, has secured the […]
Read MoreTwo missing girls, a very dead tyrant, and the possibility of a rampaging bear are only a few of the plot-twists in Gary Corby's latest murder mystery set in the Athens of Pericles
Read MoreOur book today is This Thing of Darkness, a whopping-long 2005 historical novel by Harry Thompson about the fateful voyage of the HMS Beagle to Tierra del Fuego in 1828. The ship was captained by 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, and of course its most famous passenger was the young amateur naturalist Charles Darwin. But Thompson’s novel […]
Read MoreThe fateful trip E. M. Forster took to India in 1912 was the inspiration for his greatest novel - and it's likewise the inspiration for a new novel from the author of "The Good Doctor"
Read MoreIn this spare and violent debut, a 13-year-old girl from Appalachia enters a lawless life
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.