Book Review: Chinese Love Poetry
/A pretty new anthology dips into the vast Chinese poetic tradition
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Analects of Confucius!
/Some Penguin Classics become immediately indispensable. They so firmly supplant all previous editions of their particular work that those previous editions become curiosities, interesting in only ancillary ways. A notable recent example of this would be the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of the Heike, and now the Penguin imprint clearly has another: a […]
Read MoreThe Resurrection of the Dead
/The Resurrection of the Dead We are buried below with everything we did, with our tears and our laughs. We have made storerooms of history out of it all, galleries of the past, and treasure houses, buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble in the cellars of time. We will […]
Read MoreBook Review: Islam and Nazi Germany's War
/A revelatory new book explores the uneasy dealings the Third Reich had with the thousands of Muslims who suddenly found themselves under Nazi rule
Read MoreBook Review: The War of 1812
/A fiery new history seeks to reclaim the lost honor of both Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans
Read MoreBook Review: A Land of Aching Hearts
/When the chaos of the First World War swept over the Middle East, it disrupted patterns of life that had been steady for centuries - and left conflicts that roil still today
Read MoreBy Small and Small: Midnight to 4 A. M.
/For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was […]
Read MoreBook Review: Married to the Viscount
/She's convinced they're married; he's adamant they're not. Let the Regency games begin!
Read MoreBook Review: The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane
/What an unruly, monstrous house cat hath joined together, let no man put asunder!
Read MoreBook Review: To Save a Viscount
/England's newest viscount has an assassin's target pinned to his new title, and the spies who accidentally put it there now have a nobleman to protect
Read MoreBook Review: Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination
/It's well known that Hitler looked to Mussolini's success in Italy as a model for his own fascism, but a fascinating new book details the lesser-known fact that Hitler had another model as well - an earlier and more exotic one.
Read MoreBook Review: Fear City
/F. Paul Wilson's supremely capable action-hero, "Repairman" Jack, wasn't always the kneecap-crushing arm-breaking, bad guy-defenestrating paragon his legions of fans know and love; once upon a time, he was a kneecap-crushing, arm-breaking, bad guy-defenestrating neophyte with a dream. "Fear City" takes us back to 1993.
Read MoreBook Review: The Good War
/The war in Afghanistan began promisingly - and then dragged on, fell apart, and limped to a quasi-ending. A lively new book narrates the story
Read MoreSix for the Books!
/Ink Chorus The dear old Guardian the other day published what the kids call a “listicle” – basically a themed list of items air-pumped into roughly the dimensions of an actual column – on a subject near to my heart: good books about books and reading, and I was right away reminded of a good three […]
Read MoreBook Review: Ardor
/Intellectual polymath Roberto Calasso's latest translated work is an exploration of the ancient hymns and verses of the Vedas
Read MoreBook Review: Chain of Events
/In this thriller, two specialists discover an unbelievable revelation written into the genetic code of all living things
Read MoreBooks in My Baggage!
/Ink Chorus Our book today is Lawrence Clark Powell’s utterly delightful 1960 book Books in My Baggage, one of his follow-ups to his very popular earlier work of literary musings, A Passion for Books. I thought about this one lately because I’ve been low-grade fuming for a while now about the purblind convservatism of that […]
Read MoreBook Review: Chief Executive to Chief Justice
/William Howard Taft was the only man to be both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a new book tells the story of the overlooked years in between
Read MoreBook Review: America's Pastor
/For half a century, preacher Billy Graham was an unofficial spiritual advisor to presidents and rock stars; a new biography attempts to assess his impact on mainstream American religious thought
Read MoreApproaching hoofbeats!
/No doubt some of you spotted the item in your newsfeeds: a recent article noting that both Amazon and Publisher’s Weekly have already produced their lists of the Best Books of 2014, despite the fact that the year still has two months to go. This is of course both canny and craven; on the one […]
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