Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Last week’s comics haul from my beloved Comicopia here in Boston yielded quite a bit of good stuff (including the third issue of Captain America: White and the first issue of Sam Wilson: Captain America) and one item that was as confusing as it was heart-tugging for me: the first issue of what looks to […]
Read MoreAs Hamlet would say, look here upon this picture and on this: two young men, both in their thirties, both white, both good-looking in generic kinds of ways, both intelligent, both multi-millionaires, both objects of interviews in a recent issue of New York magazine – and both, on the surface of those interviews, raging douchebags […]
Read MoreOur books today are the neatest little things you’ll see in the rest of 2015’s book-year: a set of Modern Classics from Picador Press, done up in a neat bow! In honor of their own 20th anniversary, Picador has crafted this set of Modern Classics, sturdy little hardcovers beautifully designed by Steven Seighman as compact […]
Read MoreAmong the spread of new comics on the wall at Comicopia this week were two first issues: Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, and of course I bought them both. I liked the pairing in this case; back when I first started reading the adventures of these two characters, neither one had his own book, so seeing […]
Read MoreOur book today is a classic of popular natural history from 1975, Among the Elephants by Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, who are now old and wrinkled but who were once lithe and limber back forty years ago when they first set out to study the elephant herds in the vicinity of Lake Manyara in the […]
Read MoreOur book today, a winner of a thing by Thomas Kohnstamm from 2008, asks the always-pertinent question, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? – and like almost all books with questions in the title, the answer is obvious. The book follows Kohnstamm on his transformation from an ordinary white-collar worker – with a steady girlfriend, […]
Read MoreThis week’s comics presented a stark juxtaposition between old and new, tradition and innovation, and as much as I tend to hate the new and the innovative when it comes to superhero comics, my reactions this time around were tempered by quality, which is always a nice way to have your reactions tempered. The ‘tradition’ […]
Read MoreOur book today is George Reiger’s 1983 book Wanderer On My Native Shore, a wonderfully personal work of natural history sub-titled “A Personal Guide & Tribute to the Ecology of the Atlantic Coast” which we’ve met before here at Stevereads, but I read it again recently in a kind of commemoration of that pleasant melancholy […]
Read MoreHe had the hair, the Mona Lisa smile, the subtle hands, the loudly fashionable clothing, the bad-boy attitude – it’s little wonder that Christopher Marlowe has been an extremely popular subject for fiction-writers over the years (especially blossoming after 1952, when the portrait we all so badly want to be a 21-year-old Marlowe was discovered). […]
Read MoreAny batch of new romance novels will certainly feature a few whose narratives are grounded not on people but on places. Their covers feature landscapes and promise to be “A [Location X] Novel,” and a newcomer to the phenomenon might wonder at the appeal. When we look at three of them chosen at random, that […]
Read MoreHow could I not make mention of the fact that Esquire, one of my most steadfast glossy lad-mags, hits its 1000th issue this month? To put it mildly, it’s not every magazine that reaches one thousand issues – hell, there aren’t many writing endeavors of any kind that reach such a milestone (blushing modesty prevents […]
Read MoreOur book today is On the Vineyard, a 1980 collection of short essays and reflections about Martha’s Vineyard, accompanied by stunning black-and-white photos by Peter Simon, and the impulse that drove me to take it down from my shelf is akin to the impulse that always makes me think of Cape Cod at summer’s end. […]
Read MoreOur book today is Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal The Hound of the Baskervilles,which brought back, in 1901, the beloved character of Sherlock Holmes who’d been killed off nearly a decade earlier by an author who was both bored by his formulaic stories and jealous of his international fame. The events of The Hound of the […]
Read MoreOur book today is a big fat thing called Akhenaten: King of Egypt by Cyril Aldred (when reading pretty much any history on pretty much any subject, you should, if possible, hold out for a historian named Cyril Aldred), and in addition to being a fantastic soup-to-nuts historical and archaeological account of ancient Egypt’s infamous […]
Read MoreOur book today is Shakespeare, which Anthony Burgess wrote one morning in 1970 after a 40-pint evening. The morning was raw and scratchy, one imagines, and our author, not at his best, needed some task to distract him before his four-course breakfast and pick-me-up whiskey was ready. The afternoon was already planned: a TV show […]
Read MoreOur book today is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – and only Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, here presented in a hefty green-jacketed 1931 hardcover from the old Aventine Press, whose editors decided to present the author’s 1892 edition of his great work entirely without critical apparatus of any kind. I found this Aventine volume […]
Read MoreOur book today is Twelve Days of Terror, Richard Fernicola’s 2001 history of the famous series of shark attacks that happened at the Jersey Shore in 1916, when four people were killed in July by a shark – probably a single shark, probably a bull shark, since it was able to travel up-river quite a […]
Read MoreBoth the big superhero comic book companies, Marvel and DC, are currently in continuity turmoil that would be shocking if it weren’t so crucially boring. And it makes the weekly trip to my beloved Comicopia here in Boston a bit of a trial. Gone beyond reclamation – almost beyond recall – are the days when […]
Read MoreThe latest issue of Harper’s very much wanted me to pay most of my attention to William Deresiewicz’s cover essay on how colleges and universities these days have been co-opted by a “neo-liberal” agenda that infests institutions of higher learning – and how the students themselves have also been co-opted by this agenda, now […]
Read MoreOur book today is My Own Cape Cod, which Gladys Taber wrote in 1971 about her many idyllic seasons at Still Cove, her house on Mill Pond at Orleans on Cape Cod. We’ve met Taber already here at Stevereads as the once-popular author of the Stillmeadow books (hence the name of her cove), and in […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.