Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is Lord David Cecil’s 1973 compendious charmer, The Cecils of Hatfield House, a zesty character-driven history of the many generations of the storied Cecil family which rose to prominence when canny William Cecil decided to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor (a relative term with the Cecils, but still) [...]
Read MoreJust as the last embers are flickering out on the latest Open Letters Monthly Summer Reading feature, The Weekly Standard has trundled out one of its own, and in addition to items one suspects were selected for non-literary reasons (right-wing screed-histories and the like), there were some gems: Christoph Irmscher, who is himself the author [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the 2006 DC Archive Edition featuring “The Shazam Family” but overwhelmingly devoted to the exploits of “The World’s Mightiest Boy,” Captain Marvel Junior. The character is – as you might guess – a spin-off of Fawcett Comics’ best-selling flagship super-hero, Captain Marvel, and this Archive Edition reprints his first ten appearances [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a modern-day classic from 1987, The Norton Book of Travel Writing, edited for the ages by the great Paul Fussell and featuring a stellar roster of the greatest travel-writers of all time (with one incredibly glaring exception: there is no Mary Kingsley here). We have Freya Stark, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Robert Harris’ drum-tight 2003 historical novel Pompeii, written in the formidable shadow not of Mount Vesuvius but of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 corker The Last Days of Pompeii. Bulwer-Lytton’s book has famously lodged in reading history as perhaps the single worst novel ever written (an unjust claim – the title clearly belongs [...]
Read MoreOur book today is 1867′s So Excellent a Fishe: A Natural History of Sea Turtles by the great Archie Carr, the one-time professor of Zoology at the University of Florida who also wrote the classic natural history memoir The Windward Road (recently re-issued in a lovely paperback by the University Press of Florida – hint, [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the fantastic 1998 novel An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis, a volume I’ve recommended and gifted countless times since it first appeared, even more times than its predecessor, Merlis’ stunning 1994 debut American Studies (and would be happy to gift again, should any of you want a copy), mainly for two [...]
Read MoreI thought my week’s Penny Press highlights had already passed, but the hits just keep coming! The New Yorker issue sporting the now-famous Bert & Ernie cover, for instance, features a great piece by Louis Menand called “The Color of Law,” about the systematic suppression of the black vote in the American South – an [...]
Read MoreAs I’ve had occasion to note more than once here at Stevereads, one of the things I love most about the continuing bounty of the Penny Press is the unpredictability of it all. Talented freelancers are always getting drunk with each other at parties, sharing soccer pitches in the glaring sun, ogling each other in [...]
Read MoreOur book today is John Gardner’s 1973 epic poem Jason & Medeia, and it … screeching halt, right? Yes, “epic poem” – a literary form about as dead as the dodo, an intentionally, defiantly recherche choice for any modern-day author to make, a thumb in the eye of prospective new readers, a pretentious fling of [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Hamilton Basso’s 1954 runaway bestseller The View from Pompey’s Head, which brought its fifty-year-old author the one thing he’d once upon a time wanted more than anything from the world, the one thing he’d slowly, gradually convinced himself he’d never have: renown. The book was a huge hit. It spent close [...]
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 MoreOur book today is C. S. Forester’s 1937 canon-shot of a Napoleonic sea-novel, Beat to Quarters (published in England as, sigh, The Happy Return), the book that introduced the character of Captain Horatio Hornblower to the world and single-handedly re-invigorated a sub-genre that had been quiescent for a century. The story is taut. Hornblower’s ship, [...]
Read MoreAs we’ve noted in the past, the wonders of National Geographic – unparalleled anywhere else in the Penny Press – come with a price tag. Just as the magazine is capable of infusing your day with the curiosity and sheer joy of exploration (the two exultations on which it was founded), so too is it [...]
Read MoreJust the other day, at the bookstore, a sane-and-normal-seeming customer asked me for a “fair” biography of Hitler. When I stared at her, she elaborated: a biography that wasn’t “slanted,” that had no “axe to grind,” that reflected the fact that although Hitler might have been an evil man, he was also indisputably a great [...]
Read MoreEver since Margaret Thatcher died in April and the press set about heaping ordure on her still-warm corpse, I’ve been busily, sadly reading every notice, just as I did for Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, and just as I’m sure I will for Mikhail Gorbachev. In Thatcher’s case, the sheer intensity of the [...]
Read MoreThe July issue of Vanity Fair has many standard features that are depressing. First and most noticeably, there’s the cover story-hand job common to most glossy magazines; in this case it’s a ‘profile’ of Hollywood’s current top box office Everyman, Channing Tatum, whose he-man pouting on the cover over the banner reading “Channing Tatum: An [...]
Read MoreLiterary reputations are a lot like ghosts – they make odd noises, they hang around long after their heartbeat has ceased, and they attract the belief of the credulous all over the world. Just as a bloated mass of spectral ectoplasm was reputedly once a two-timing grocer, so a bloated mass of lazy bloviation [...]
Read MoreJust when you thought the whole ‘negativity-in-book-reviews’ teacup-tempest had finally blown itself out, no less an unlikely Lady Bracknell than Clive James stirs it back up again. Himself a critic of legendary and delightful omni-competence, James has recently announced that his health has gone into serious decline (he just published a poem about it – [...]
Read MoreThroughout the year, the New York Review of Books is celebrating its 50th anniversary by reprinting excerpts from pieces by some of its most lauded contributors. The excerpts appear on the last page of every issue, and considering the lineup of literary powerhouses the NYRB has always boasted, you’d think the presence of such a [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.