Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
When Homo sapiens appeared in Europe 45,000 years ago, most of the long-established species there - including the Neanderthals - began to disappear. Did Homo sapiens wipe them out? And if so, did they have help from somebody right there in your living room?
Read MoreA new reprint line from the New York Review of Books concentrates on literature from - and on - China's long literary history, and the first three volumes offer the strange, the familiar, and the beautiful.
Read MoreHistorical novelist Andrew Levkoff stuffs the last installment of his "Bow of Heaven" trilogy with battles, love, loyalty betrayed, crucifixion, cross-purposes, loyalty regained, and deep reflections on what it all means.
Read MoreHugely talented biographer Andrew Roberts has written a big biography of Napoleon Bonaparte - but when it comes to such a well-known figure, are readers in danger of fatigue de bataille?
Read MoreJust in time for the November midterm elections, we do what doubters said couldn't be done: we present you with a list of ten great political books that doesn't include Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes.
Read MoreVeteran historian Brookhiser takes a look at the formative influences on Abraham Lincoln - not so much his own father as the Founding Fathers.
Read MoreThe third voume of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland trilogy is sure to fly off the shelves, but those flying copies will be light to the tune of a few needed footnotes, omissions our managing editor finds, to say the least, troubling.
Read MoreBabe 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.
Read MoreThomas Piketty's great mountain of Gallic macro-economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was the hit of the Western world for one heady season. Then the parade moved on, and we were left, dazed and disheveled, wondering if we've been fed un truc de ouf. Our Peer Review attempts to sort out the l'affaire Piketty
Read MoreRonald Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War at Reykjavik in 1985. And if you believe that, his loyal aid Ken Adelman has a book to sell you.
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Read MoreIn her brilliantly scathing new book, Elaine Scarry charges that US Presidents, in maintaining and augmenting an enormous nuclear arsenal, have broken the social contract and become monarchs in all but name.
Read MoreShe was the daughter, the sister, and the wife of kings in one of England's most turbulent periods, but Alison Weir's new biography is the first to make us feel we really know Elizabeth of York.
Read MoreThe age of Roosevelt and Taft was also the age of Progressive reform - spearheaded by an amazing team of 'muckraking' writers the like of which the United States had never seen.
Read MoreThe meek and peaceful Jesus has become the standard Christian image of the Messiah. Religious scholar Reza Aslan's controversial new book shatters that image and replaces it with something very different: a violent revolutionary who came not to bring peace but a sword.
Read MoreIn the famous jingle 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,' Katherine Parr comes last - the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. But she was far more than that - scholar, regent, and passionate young woman - as a new Tudor historical novel attempts to portray
Read MoreA debut novel of alternate history spins out one of the most tantalizing hypotheticals of the past: what if Anne Boleyn had managed to give King Henry VIII a healthy male heir? Some of the answers - and some of the resulting mysteries - may surprise you.
Read MoreHe travelled the fledgling United States shooting birds, wiring them into poses, and then painting them for eternity - he was John James Audubon, and his epic "The Birds of America" has a beautiful, gargantuan new edition from Abbeville Press
Read More"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreAs Americans go to the polls this month to elect a president, some recent biographies examine the lives of five very different men who once held the office.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.