Book Review: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
/The great critic and memoirist Clive James has a volume of new poems doing some very old things
Read MoreBook Review: Octopus!
/The strangest, most alien creatures on the Earth have three hearts and big, unfathomable brains - and, famously, eight arms. It's the sprawling family of octopus species, and they get a soup-to-nuts examination in Katherine Harmon Courage's new book
Read MoreBook Review: The Spanish Queen
/King Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, takes center stage in a new novel by Tudor historian Carolly Erickson
Read MoreBook Review: The Urban Bestiary
/Coyotes prowl our golf courses, cougars haunt our bike-trails, and owls skinny-dip in our bird-baths - a new book looks at the wild animals that fill in the spaces of human cities
Read MoreBook Review: Naturalists at Sea
/When the South Pacific opened up for Western exploration, 'experimental gentlemen' swarmed there to make discoveries - and to make history
Read MoreThe New Yorker War Album!
/Our book today is one of those little treasures that crop up so regularly at my beloved Brattle Bookshop: a slightly battered copy of The New Yorker War Album from 1942, this one inscribed as a present in 1942 in Washington, D.C. by a man named Butch to his “skipper”: “Here’s a few smiles and [...]
Read MoreNature’s Year!
/Our book today is a re-read, one of the many, many such re-reads I tend to do during any given month: John Hay’s 1961 classic Nature’s Year, with beautiful illustrations by David Grose. The book is sub-titled “The Seasons of Cape Cod,” and that’s probably why I re-read it, since the waning days of summer [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Jonathan Swift
/It's not every writer who can write a book that stays in print continuously for 300 years, but the author of "Gulliver's Travels" is one of those writers. A lively new biography looks at the great Jonathan Swift
Read MoreBook Review: Henry VIII - The Life and Rule of England's Nero
/England's 'bluff king Hal' is put under the microscope in a scathing new biography
Read MoreArthur Rex!
/Our book today is Thomas Berger’s 1978 foray into Camelot fiction, Arthur Rex, and as I’ve had occasion to mention before, it represents just that same kind of oddity that seems to come from many popular authors when they’re seized – almost invariably at middle age – with an apparently irresistible urge to compose Arthurian [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Tudors
/Our reigning master of vigorous popular history takes on the most vigorous, popular English dynasty of them all
Read MoreArmageddon by Max Hastings
/Our book today is Max Hasting’s smashingly good 2004 Armageddon: The Battle for Germany – 1944-1945, a fat, heavily-detailed account of the final months of World War II in Western Europe, the fitful and protracted mopping-up about which Winston Churchill said in February of 1945, “Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever [...]
Read MoreComics: Essential Thor volume 7!
/Our book today is Marvel Comics’ Essential Thor Volume 7, collecting Thor issues 248 to 271 and Annuals 5 and 6 – all stories dating from the halcyon late 1970s. Almost all of these stories are written by Len Wein and drawn by either well-established comics legend John Buscema at the bored tail-end of his [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Queen Anne
/The much-vexed life of the last Stuart monarch gets a gripping, electrifyingly good new examination
Read MoreThe Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs!
/Our book today is an enormous treat now out from Baen Books: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, edited by Mike Resnick and Robert Garcia, sporting a very good front cover (featuring John Carter of Mars and a sultry Martian warrior-woman holding a strategically-placed saber) and a quietly superb back cover (featuring Tarzan standing on [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Jack London, An American Life
/A new life of Jack London - by the world's foremost authority on the man's life and work.
Read MoreBook Review: My Crazy Century
/Now at last in an English translation: the heart-breaking, history-making memoir of the world's greatest Czech writer
Read MoreBook Review: Catastrophe 1914
/A master military historian joins the crowd writing about the outbreak of the First World War
Read MoreBook Review: My 1980s & Other Essays
/A new collection of personal essays - some funny, some touching, all piercingly intelligent - from one of America's greatest cultural critics
Read MoreThe Walt Simonson Thor!
/Our book today is the latest Marvel Comics paperback reprint from what’s become known in reverential whispers as “The Simonson Run.” Walt Simonson’s run as writer and artist on Thor only lasted a comparatively short time – from the golden year of 1983 to the golden year of 1986 – but media experts and comics [...]
Read More