Book Review: Tamil
/A dense yet lyrical new book tells the long, intricate life story of the Tamil language and Tamil literature
Read MoreHypocritical Blather in the Penny Press!
/Like plenty of other people (perhaps particularly other beagle-fanciers), I loved Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Dish in most of its various incarnations over the years, and I read it eagerly even when, as was very often the case, I disagreed with the author. I was disappointed when he rather ostentatiously announced his retirement from blogging […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Playful Little Dog
/Penguin Random House continues its re-issue series of classic little children's books.
Read MoreBook Review: Lusitania - The Cultural History of a Catastrophe
/Just over a century ago, the luxury liner Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat with great loss of life, a disaster that, as a new book explains, re-shaped the world.
Read MoreThe beloved author of "The Egg and I" receives her first full-length biography
Read MoreWagging Tails!
/Our book today is a little treasure from deep, deep in the shadowy recesses of my personal library: a much-loved 1955 volume called Wagging Tails: An Album of Dogs, written by Marguerite Henry and drawn by Wesley Dennis. It’s an exuberantly friendly, colorful book full of friendly dogs, a book put out by Rand McNally […]
Read MoreBook Review: Cocteau - A Life
/The multi-faceted artist and director Jean Cocteau is the subject of a mammoth biography, newly translated into English
Read MoreBook Review: Selling Hitler
/A brilliant new study anatomizes the mechanisms of Nazi propaganda
Read MoreBook Review: Deepwater Horizon
/The explosion, fire, sinking, and oil spill of the Deepwater Horizon back in 2010 gets a definitive scholarly analysis.
Read MoreBook Review: If Venice Dies
/The tourist magnet of Venice faces an uncertain future on many fronts - but Salvatore Settis has many possible solutions in mind ...
Read MoreDürer’s Record of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries!
/Our book today is a little-known absolute gem that owes what very limited popular readership it’s ever had in America in the last eighty years to the stalwart old Dover reprint line as it once was – not its reprints of canonical classics, which have always been and continue to be glaringly ugly and editorially […]
Read MoreBook Review: Where Song Began
/The overflowing diversity of Australian bird life is the subject of Tim Low's captivating new book
Read MoreBook Review: Why Birds Matter
/Who can measure the worth of a nightingale's song? Why scientists can, you silly thing!
Read MoreComrade Loves of the Samurai!
/Our book today is Comrade Loves of the Samurai, a pokey little translation by E. Powys Mathers from way back in 1928, when it appeared in a privately-published set of high-class smut called Eastern Love. The set featured two books: selections from the Nanshoku Okagami of the great 17th century Japanese author Saikaku Ihara, here […]
Read MoreBook Review: Red Right Hand
/A young woman's life is turned upside-down when she encounters a strange man with a molten red hand.
Read MoreBook Review: Red Right Hand
/The hitman who kills hitmen is contracted by a semi-rogue FBI agent to take on a particularly delicate - and dangerous - side-mission
Read MoreThe Cape at Summer’s End: Cape Cod Yesterdays!
/Our book today is Cape Cod Yesterdays, which bestselling novelist Joseph C. Lincoln dashed off in 1935 and which went through his customary flurry of reprints, since the man was a storyteller with a golden touch, an immensely popular bestselling author of a century ago who built a large chunk of his career on his […]
Read MoreSingle Occupancy, Lots of Sunlight, Water Included
/For a century, humans have been searching for any sign of extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise. A new book tells the story of that quest - and keeps its geeky hope alive.
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