Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
The May-June issue of Audubon has a cover story, “From Billions to None” by Barry Yeoman, that takes advantage of a centennial anniversary in its own way every bit as saddening as that of the opening of the First World War: the death in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 of Martha, the world’s last passenger […]
Read MoreOur book today is 2005’s The Cold Dish, the first installment in Craig Johnson’s hugely successful series of mystery novels set in the fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming and starring laconic, leather-tough sheriff Walt Longmire and a terrifically engaging cast of supporting characters, from his long-time friend and Cheyenne saloon owner Henry Standing Bear to his […]
Read MoreIt’s a sad commentary on our relevance-obsessed and overcrowded society that the editorial Powers That Be at the National Geographic magazine probably didn’t hesitate for a moment before choosing the cover story for their May issue: the looming ecological crisis of mass-produced food supply. That article, by Jonathan Foley, is both fascinating and alarming … […]
Read MoreOur book today is Ben Pastor’s A Dark Song of Blood, her third murder mystery starring Nazi Wehrmacht officer Martin Bora (the first two were Lumen and Liar Moon). The book is out now in a very sturdy paperback from Bitter Lemon Press, and it makes for a very absorbing – although very dark – […]
Read MoreOur book today is Aldo Buzzi’s 1996 composite travel book Cechov a Sondrio e altri viaggi, brought out by Random House in a very good translation by Ann Goldstein and titled Journey to the Land of the Flies (poor Chekhov gets the heave-ho). Buzzi’s formal training was as an architect, but for most of his […]
Read MoreAs a reader who’s deeply interested in what other people – and especially young people – are reading and why, how could I not be fascinated by the teeming subset of YouTube known as BookTube? That’s the sprawling (and constantly growing) community of channels on YouTube devoted entirely to books – book reviews, book discussions, […]
Read MoreOur book today is 1991’s Death of the Duchess by Elizabeth Eyre, which is a pseudonym for the London writing team of Jill Staynes and Magaret Storey (both of which sound more like pseudonyms than “Elizabeth Eyre,” but then, what would I know of pseudonyms?). Death of the Duchess is a murder mystery set in […]
Read MoreOur book today is Thomas Costain’s magnificent 1958 volume The Three Edwards, the third in his “Pageant of England” series, this one centering on the reigns of Kings Edward I, II, and III and thus covering some of the most dramatic and vibrant years in English history. Costain – an old newspaperman from Canada who […]
Read MoreMy favorite ironic, unintentional, sexist contrast of the month comes from the latest issue of GQ: quite by the random chance of advertising space, we get these two pictures side-by-side. On the one side, there’s a young woman who’s dementedly devoted to re-shaping her body into a living simulacrum of a Barbie doll, a self-mutilation GQ‘s […]
Read MoreOur book today is Kenneth Clark’s slim 1939 monograph Leonardo Da Vinci, here presented in the very pretty 1989 Penguin reprint in an extra-sized paperback with loads of illustrations. The old Pelican mass market paperback of the book also had loads of illustrations, mind you, but for binding reasons they were all lumped together in […]
Read MoreOur book today is Scottish author Ewart Hutton’s Dead People, the follow-up to his debut Good People (the latter’s staid title was given a private edge by the book’s plot; this current book provides no such edge, so its title is the equivalent of Murder Mystery, alas), and its basic premise will be familiar to […]
Read MoreOur book today is Carl Sagan’s intensely personal and snarkily intelligent 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, a reasoned cry of defiance against what Sagan, approaching the end of his life, viewed as the gathering forces of intolerance and stupidity. Sagan spent his entire life waging a smiling, well-mannered, […]
Read MoreOur book today is a steely, stunningly unsettling novella The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, best known today for her hefty works of nonfiction like The Meaning of Treason and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, works written after long periods of intense deliberation. This novella is a very different thing, as thin and […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics feel practically inevitable. When the great translator Royall Tyler brought out his groundbreaking edition of the fourteenth-century Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike in 2012 from the Viking press, it became one of that category, and now it’s arrived: a beautiful big paperback Penguin Classic of the Heike edition, which so [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the unsinkable 1950 Patricia Highsmith masterpiece Strangers on A Train, which wastes no time in leaping straight to the area of crime-fiction that always fascinated her: motive. Mystery novels love to play with all three of the tenets of crime – motive, means, and opportunity – but every author finds his [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Memoirs of an Editor, a big, bustling 1924 volume by Edward Mitchell, who was for a long time the editor-in-chief of the old New York Sun, a position he took over from his semi-legendary predecessor, Charles A. Dana, a brilliant and recondite figure who was always the smartest person in any [...]
Read MoreOur book today is 1994′s Pictures of Perfection, one of the incredibly entertaining Dalziel & Pascoe mystery novels of the late, great Reginald Hill, although really I could be just as happy picking any of these delightful novels to re-read and praise here. Hill wrote mountains of prose (the full catalog may never be assembled, [...]
Read MoreThe New York Times Book Review pauses to take note of the fact that it’s been twenty years since Harold Bloom wrote his big, controversial book The Western Canon, a little anniversary that had completely slipped my mind. To honor the occasion, the NYTBR enlisted two of our sharpest public thinkers, Pankaj Mishra and [...]
Read MoreOur book today is the lusty 1970 historical novel The Kings Of Vain Intent by Graham Shelby, a mid-20th century hack book reviewer who struck historical novel gold with his book The Knights of Dark Renown, the prequel to this present book. Shelby is a largely artless writer, but he knows full well the visceral [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Thomas Harris’s ultra-famous 1981 novel Red Dragon, the perfect shard of falling crystal that triggered an avalanche of such proportions that most novelists don’t even dare to dream that anything like it will happen to them. The book was a moderate seller for Bantam in its modest original printing despite near-universal [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.