Book Review: The Fate of Rome
/To the long list of potential explanations for the fall of Rome, a gripping new book adds one more: climate change.
Read MoreBook Review: Giannozzo Manetti
/New in the I Tatti series: a tract in praise of Christianity (at the expense of Jews and ancient pagans) by a towering figure of the early Renaissance.
Read MoreBook Review: The First Domestication
/The ancient partnership between humans and canines is the subject of a thorough new volume of research
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Ice!
/Some Penguin Classics don’t seem quite right until you actually see them in the familiar restrained format, staring out at you with that quintessential Penguin Classic quiet assurance (in this case considerably abetted by a stark cover illustration by Hsiao-Ron Cheng). Then you start to think, “Well yes, this is probably right. I’ve certainly never […]
Read MoreBook Review: Spineless
/A fascinating new book looks at the unendingly odd jellyfish - and some of the unexpected roles it plays in the 21st century world.
Read MoreBook Review: The Friendly Orange Glow
/A tremendously involving narrative history of a forgotten chapter in Internet history
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Heart of Darkness!
/Some Penguin Classics are beautiful productions in and of themselves, quite separate from the beauty (or, in the case of some authors reprinted with inexplicable regularity, the lack thereof) of the prose involved. Conspicuous along these lines is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition line, which puts wonderful extra effort into making paperback classics worth treasuring […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Dawn Watch
/A fantastic new biography of Joseph Conrad follows him around in his travels and delves into the heart of his many books.
Read MoreBook Review: The Big Book of the Continental Op
/All of Dashiell Hammett's stories and novels featuring the Continental Op, collected in one volume for the first time.
Read MoreGeorgie!
/Our book today is an awkward, adorable little children’s classic from the bygone era of 1944: Georgie by Robert Bright, an old-school hack of the first water (and Boston Transcript alum, if those two things aren’t already redundant) who wrote a kids book about a lonely ghost and watched in bemused wonder as that book […]
Read MoreBook Review: Cartoon County
/In "Cartoon County," Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy recounts his famous cartoonist father's adventures during the heyday of the American pop art industry.
Read MoreBook Review: Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
/The life stories of twelve incredible medieval manuscripts.
Read MoreBook Review: The Water Will Come
/A powerful new book covers in terrifying detail what happens to the modern world if Earth's ice caps dissolve.
Read MoreMan's Pest Friend
/Only one dog out of every five on Earth is somebody's pet; the rest are roamers in streets and city dumps. A fascinating new book looks at the lives of the canine majority.
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