Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is George Steiner’s meaty 1996 collection of critical essays, No Passion Spent, which features 21 pieces drawn from two decades of Steiner’s long career as a literary journalist. During the course of that career, he sold pieces on a wide array of topics to an almost equally wide array of paying venues, [...]
Read MoreInternational shipping provides virtually everything around you as you read this (including the computer you're reading it on), and yet most people no nothing about this reclusive industry. Rose George's new book sheds some light.
Read MoreOur book today is Frances Noyes Hart’s 1931 charmer Pigs in Clover, which purports to record a roundabout journey by car through France that she took one holiday season with her husband Edward Hart, the son of the man who was present at the creation, so to speak, of the Associated Press. Long before that [...]
Read MoreThe Battle of Kursk was one of the most epic confrontations in the history of warfare - a vivid new history calls it the turning point of the entire Second World War
Read MoreNo matter how an imaginative child might shape-shift, a mother's love follows right along in Nancy Tillman's enchanting new picture book
Read MoreHuge multi-part special-run series make good business for four-color comics companies, I get that. The basic model is now infinitely replicated: the central spine of a six or eight-issue mini-series feeding into an extended nervous system of tie-in issues designed to part nervous fanboy completists from their apparently-inexhaustible spending money. Nowadays, the leverage placed on [...]
Read MoreMore than at any point in their collective history, mankind's great ape cousins face the threat of total extinction. A passionate new book outlines all the threats - and clings to some hope
Read MoreDC Comics is currently in the middle of a big readership-grabbing multi-issue crossover event called “Trinity War,” and that big event is going to blend into the next, something called “Forever Evil” that will feature another mini-series and some collectible, gimmicky covers. The company’s successful reboot of its entire line of comics, its “New [...]
Read MoreRats, snakes, gulls, cockroaches, and half a dozen other notorious varmints - a delightful new anthology takes readers deep inside the world of the animals they love to hate
Read MoreA new paperback explores the mysteries of turtles
Read MoreThe powerhouse annual science fiction anthology series turns thirty with a new collection drawn from all the sci-fi periodicals of the English-speaking world
Read MoreThe great 20th century poet Anthony Hecht was also a charming and indefatigable letter-writer. A new volume does its best to capture the range and wit that captivated two generations of correspondents.
Read MoreIt’s fashion month in the Penny Press these days, which means the square-bound glossies are suddenly a bit thicker and much more tightly crammed with full-color full-page spreads of varied and frenzied incomprehensibility. As many of you will have no trouble believing, fashion is a mystery to me; not only do I completely lack the [...]
Read MoreThe ancient Roman historian Suetonius wrote such a rollicking, gossipy book about the first twelve emperors that historians have been re-writing his book ever since
Read MoreThe exhaustive Yale edition of the complete correspondence of T. S. Eliot reaches a very busy period in the life of Eliot the editor and businessman, working away at the center of a vast and fascinating literary world
Read MoreOur book today is Anne Boleyn by Norah Lofts, written in 1974 when our author was the ripe old age of 75. But before all you Norah Lofts fans go shuffling to the bookshelf, rest assured that I’m not mixing up the title of Lofts’ great 1963 Anne Boleyn novel The Concubine; I’m referring instead [...]
Read MoreThe great - and problematic - 20th century composer gets a broad-minded and intensely sensitive new biography
Read More"In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of time and circumstances. They do not wait as man does ..." A beautiful new edition of Henry David Thoreau's essays.
Read MoreOur book today is Frank Schatzing’s 2004 doorstop eco-thriller Der Schwarm, which was translated into English (by Sally-Ann Spencer) in 2006 as The Swarm, and it just naturally calls up a line from Cooper’s Creek by that literary household name, Alan Moorehead: “Nothing in this strange country seemed to bear the slightest resemblance to the [...]
Read MoreThe long-rumored psychic powers of the human brain get a high-spirited new examination.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.