Six for the Storm!
/Six sure-fire books to help you weather the storm!
Read MoreBook Review: Among the Islands
/At the beginning of his career, the great scientist-explorer Tim Flannery literally sailed to the ends of the earth and back - here he sits down to tell some of those stories
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Charles Lamb!
/Some Penguin Classics almost seem like they’ve been around forever, and yet a prime such example, the Selected Prose of Charles Lamb, only came into existence in 1985, in a pretty trade paperback with Hazlitt’s famous portrait of the young Lamb on its cover. The edition is edited by Adam Phillips, whose Introduction cites Lamb’s [...]
Read MoreBook Review: London Eye
/In the opening volume of the "Toxic City" series, London is cut off from the rest of the world and filling up with super-powered mutants - two things which have been true on YouTube for some time now.
Read MoreBook Review: The Lion Sleeps Tonight
/The celebrated South African author of "My Traitor's Heart" publishes a collection of his rabble-rousing, fortifying New Journalism pieces
Read MoreWords v.s. Pictures in the Penny Press!
/The great Lev Grossman has a typically smart and interesting piece in last week’s Time (the issue with the hideous cover advertising 60 different stories inside), on a subject of perennial fascination: books translated into movies. I’ve long been on record with the audacious opinion that virtually every movie version ever filmed is better than [...]
Read MoreComics: The Shadow - Blood & Judgment
/Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! With some ample assistance from comics legend Howard Chaykin
Read MoreThe burgeoning human population is encountering new and strange pathogens every day - how long until one of them becomes the next HIV ... or Black Death?
Read MoreSix for a Start!
/The age-old publishing maxim (it’s actually a maxim for everything, but we’ll stay on our home ground), “Stick With What Works,” has few starker applications than the books-in-series that have long afflicted the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Long after whole forests were pulped to make endless “Gor” and “Lensman” books possible (although nothing could make them readable), [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Through the Eye of a Needle
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The new book by the great Peter Brown examines a deep conflict: Christ specifically orders Christians to be poor, but Christians would rather not be, thanks just the same.
Read MoreRating the Blighters in the Penny Press!
/As we’ve so often noted about the Penny Press, the Lord giveth, and the Lord talketh out His ass. Such was certainly the case with last week’s TLS, in which the ‘debit’ column had an item that nearly made me spit up my Tatws Pum Munud in outrage. The offending piece was by Jonathan Benthall, [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Founders and Finance
/The newly-born United States was a disorganized and largely bucolic hodge-podge until three clear-eyed financiers - all of them immigrants - worked to create a new and more monetized system
Read MoreBook Review: Joseph Anton
/The great novelist tells the beguiling story of the man he became in order to escape a death sentence
Read MoreLucky Jim!
/Our book today is Kingsley Amis’ 1954 debut novel Lucky Jim, the recent New York Review of Books re-issue of which prompted a literary friend of mine to lament, “Do we really need this? Am I missing something, or is this thing just a boring, overpraised academia-novel that was never that good to begin with?” This [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Ice Castle
/To find their missing cousin, young heroes Daphne and Ivan must return to the magical land of Lexicon and confront yet more of its brain-teasing adventures.
Read MoreThe Last Time I Saw … Venice!
/Our book today is 2005′s The Last Time I Saw Venice, by the indomitable Australian romance novelist Vivienne Wallington, a former librarian who wrote some twenty romances for Mills & Boon under the pen-name of Elizabeth Duke and then did a stint writing Silhouette romances for Harlequin under her own name, this one being (so [...]
Read MoreA Wanderer in … Venice!
/Our book today is A Wanderer in Venice by our old friend E. V. Lucas, written in the last halcyon interval the world has ever seen and published just as that interval was ending, in November of 1914. Lucas was an indefatigable writer (as shocking as it will seem to our modern ethics, he even [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Listening In
/A new book authorized by the Kennedy Library provides some slices of living history: tapes and transcripts of President John F. Kennedy at work in the White House.
Read MoreBook Review: Commentaries on Plato
/Marsilio Ficino's enormous commentary on the Parmenides of Plato receives a fantastic scholarly edition from - who else? - Harvard's I Tatti Renaissance Library
Read MoreComics: Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut
/Vultures, black cats, and a gigantic, unbeatable foe: it's a week in the life of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!
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