Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is a slim little garlic tart: Table Manners: How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother, a 130-page guide to proper behavior written by Jeremiah Tower, whose author-note refers to him, non-ironically and without so much as a glance in the direction of the Maidu or Mojave, as “the forefather […]
Read MoreThe larger-than-life medieval Frankish king Charlemagne is the subject of a definitive single-volume biography now translated into English
Read MoreOur book today is Unconditional: Older Dogs, Deeper Love, a glorious result of photographer Jane Sobel Klonsky’s journeys around the United States, talking to people about their old dogs. This is a book that will bring a painful smile to the face of any dog owner, because its subject is the contradiction at the heart […]
Read MoreA sumptuous new biography of the man behind the Turner legend
Read MoreAs I’ve readily admitted in the past, the lad-mags for which I have something of a pronounced sweet-tooth aren’t really the places you go if you’re looking for literary coverage. It’s true that some of them pay their freelancers well, so in the rear pages of many an issue, you can often find writing that […]
Read MoreThe Sioux medicine man and centerpiece of "Black Elk Speaks" is the subject of a comprehensive new biography
Read MoreOur book today is a kind of thing I’ve praised here at Stevereads many times in the past: regional natural history, in this case a pretty new volume from University Press of New England called Through a Naturalist’s Eyes: Exploring the Nature of New England, written by Michael Caduto and illustrated throughout by Adelaide Murphy […]
Read MoreA big new biography attempts to get at the flesh-and-blood man behind the problematic theory of Marxism
Read MoreA big, generous new biography of the man who created Dracula
Read MoreOur book today is a lovely squat little thing from Clarkson Potter publishers: Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores, subtitled “True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers.” In it, writer and illustrator Bob Eckstein visits dozens of bookshops around the world – and hears about a few that no longer […]
Read MoreA lively new history of the years England fought alone against the might of Nazi Germany
Read MoreThe editors of Vanity Fair magazine delve into their century of writing to serve up dozens of their best writers writing about other writers.
Read MoreA gripping new history tells the broader story of the Viking Era
Read MoreA lively new biography tells the story of iconic urban visionary and outspoken cultural critic Jane Jacobs.
Read MoreOur book today is Sorry, Lady – This Beach is Private!, a 1963 collection of the cartoons and illustrations of James Stevenson, he of New Yorker fame. This volume collects dozens of Stevenson’s now-iconic little gems from his long heyday with the magazine throughout the 1950s and ’60s. They’re every bit as much of a […]
Read MoreThe serial killer who stalked the streets of London in 1888 and became immortal under the name Jack the Ripper is the subject of a sumptuous new collection of fact and fiction.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.