Book 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!
Read MoreThe World … of Venice!
/Our book today is the oft-revised The World of Venice, originally written by the great British historian and travel-writer James Morris, then revised by him, then substantially re-written when he become Jan Morris, and then revised by her as well – it’s as touched-up as a water-damaged Tiepolo, as fluid and gorgeous a thing as [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Iliad
/Homer's Iliad gets a new and unconventional translation into sometimes very familiar language
Read MoreWild Nights!
/Our book today is Wild Nights, the winning little work of urban natural history Anne Matthews wrote in 2001, a smart, informed book that follows in the natural history footsteps of such works as Cathy Johnson’s The Nocturnal Naturalist (and act as precursors to great books like Marie Winn’s Central Park in the Dark) by [...]
Read MoreOne Mykonos!
/A sudsy, salty, saucy Mediterranean memoir comes with a light spray of classical allusions ...
Read MoreNow in Paperback: The Paperboy
/Pete Dexter's lean, harrowing novel of murder and ambition is coming to the big screen with a full complement of movie stars - and a new paperback edition of the book is a happy by-product.
Read MoreThe Ring and the Book!
/In 1868, Robert Browning completed a long poem about an old murder case ...
Read MoreA Military History of the Western World!
/A magnificent three-volume history of warfare in the West.
Read MoreLeviathan Grimoire
/Their brains - their digits - their eyes - their locomotion - their families - their staggeringly long reign over the planet Earth: it's all here, and much, much more. The greatest dinosaur reference work just got even better.
Read MoreBook Review: The Exceptions
/The son of a powerful crime family falls in love with a young woman in the Witness Protection Program - a young woman his family wants dead! Don't you hate it when that happens?
Read MoreNow in Paperback: Bloodlands
/A stark and powerful account of the killing regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - and of the blood-soaked stretch of middle Europe where those regimes did their work.
Read MoreBook Review: Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?
/A slim, engaging new book tries to take an objective look at the popular question of Shakespearean authorship - if such objectivity is even possible.
Read MoreDog-torturer Michael Vick writes a triumphalist come-back memoir.
Read MoreBook Review: The Christmas Carol Murders
/A Dickens-obsessed little Oregon town plays unwilling host to - what else? - a Dickens-themed murder in this captivating mystery debut
Read MoreBook Review: Beyond Rosie the Riveter
/During World War Two, thousands of men left U.S. jobs in order to join the military - and thousands of women stepped in to fill those jobs ... and in some cases join the military too. A fascinating new book looks at what magazine cartoons had to say about all this.
Read MoreBook Review: Blood Eye (Raven, Book One)
/Now in the U.S.: an epic, gore-spattered series about a roving band of Viking warriors!
Read MoreBook Review: The Unfaithful Queen
/Young, vain, unfaithful Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, regularly draws writers intent on finding heroism in her brief life & times; Carolly Erickson is the latest aspirant.
Read MoreBook Review: I, Jane
/The meek and dutiful Jane Seymour, mother of Henry VIII's long-sought male heir, takes center stage in a new historical novel about her life and times.
Read MoreBook Review: Mistress of Mourning
/Tragedy haunted the earliest years of the new Tudor dynasty, and in this atmospheric new novel, a candle-maker and a courier are tasked with finding out why.
Read More