Book Review: The Great War for Peace
/Did the cataclysmic First World War actually have a hidden peace-dividend? Did it change the vocabulary of rapprochement forever? A vigorous new study makes a daring case
Read MoreMystery Monday: Thus Was Adonis Murdered!
/Our book today is 1981’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell, the pen name taken by Sarah Cockburn, the witty and delightful sister of famed muckraking journalists Patrick, Alexander, and Andrew Cockburn. She was a London barrister in the eccentric Rumpole mode, and in the down-time from her busy legal profession, she wrote murder […]
Read MoreBook Review: War of Attrition
/One of the foremost historians of the First World War offers a comprehensive and brutal overview of the conflict that gave birth to the modern world
Read MoreA Gathering of Shore Birds!
/Our book today is the utterly charming A Gathering of Shore Birds, a 1960 compilation of the wonderful bird-life columns Dr. Henry Marion Hall wrote for Audubon Magazine more than half a century ago. The editors at Devon-Adair (as the outfit used to be in palmier days, happy and sane) had the inspired notion to […]
Read MoreBook Review: A Mad Catastrophe
/A gripping account of the final days of the inept, tottering Austro-Hungarian empire - and the military apocalypse it helped to usher in
Read MoreClassics Reissued: Richard III
/The discovery of Richard III's skeleton in 2012 has flushed a number of books about the legendary dark monarch back into print - and none more welcome than this snappy volume by veteran biographer Desmond Seward
Read MorePit Bulls in the Penny Press
/Naturally, I was eager to read Tom Junod’s piece in the new Esquire, “The State of the American Dog,” which is about the unfair stigmatizing of pit bulls in America and their subsequent skyrocketing execution rates in animals shelters across the country. And on a prose level, the piece itself doesn’t disappoint: Junod is a […]
Read MoreBook Review: Season to Taste
/A discontented English housewife impulsively kills her husband and is then faced with the logistical problem of what to do with his body. In Natalie Young's chillingly readable new novel, that housewife does what comes naturally
Read MoreBook Review: The Visitors
/In Sally Beauman's new novel, a young girl sent to Egypt for her health becomes entangled in dramatic events surrounding Howard Carter's discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb ...
Read MoreBook Review: Facts and Inventions
/The boozy, gossipy author of "The Life of Johnson" was a working journalist-hack for the whole of his life, but hardly any of that material has been cleaned up and presented to the modern reader - until now, in a groundbreaking new volume from Yale University Press
Read MoreBook Review: The Unknown Lloyd George
/One of the greatest British Prime Ministers of them all gets an authoritative new biography
Read MoreThe Third Reich in Power
/Our book today is The Third Reich in Power, the massive 2005 middle block volume in Richard Evans’s enormous Nazi Germany trilogy, the first volume of which covers the Hitlerian rise to power and is necessarily the sketchiest of the three and the third volume of which, The Third Reich at War (which I reviewed […]
Read MoreThe Reign of Saturn
/Babe Ruth, Mayor Walker, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Parker - New York City in the Jazz Age was a bristling landscape of giants, most of them from out of town. A vast and enthralling new history tells the stories of the people who made the Big Apple.
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