Comics: X-Men - The Hidden Years, Volume 2
/The 'lost' adventures of Marvel Comics' original team of mutant superheroes, the X-Men
Read MoreFrauds aplenty in the Penny Press!
/It was a positive relief to escape from the now-deafening barrage of periodical commentary on the 2012 U.S. presidential election (my last ’12 election went very poorly – I’m hoping for better this time around) by leaping into the jam-packed pages of last week’s New York. There I found some first-rate movie-reviewing from David Edelstein, [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Rise to Greatness
/"It was the year in which the Civil War became a cataclysm, the federal government became a colossus, and the Confederacy came nearest to winning its independence ..."
Read MoreNow in Paperback: Forever Rumpole
/A generous collection of stories featuring John Mortimer's immortal creation, wine-swilling judge-taunting criminal-defending barrister, Horace Rumpole of the Old Bailey
Read MoreThe Power Season
/As Americans go to the polls this month to elect a president, some recent biographies examine the lives of five very different men who once held the office.
Read MoreSix for the Storm!
/Six sure-fire books to help you weather the storm!
Read MoreBook Review: Among the Islands
/At the beginning of his career, the great scientist-explorer Tim Flannery literally sailed to the ends of the earth and back - here he sits down to tell some of those stories
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Charles Lamb!
/Some Penguin Classics almost seem like they’ve been around forever, and yet a prime such example, the Selected Prose of Charles Lamb, only came into existence in 1985, in a pretty trade paperback with Hazlitt’s famous portrait of the young Lamb on its cover. The edition is edited by Adam Phillips, whose Introduction cites Lamb’s [...]
Read MoreBook Review: London Eye
/In the opening volume of the "Toxic City" series, London is cut off from the rest of the world and filling up with super-powered mutants - two things which have been true on YouTube for some time now.
Read MoreBook Review: The Lion Sleeps Tonight
/The celebrated South African author of "My Traitor's Heart" publishes a collection of his rabble-rousing, fortifying New Journalism pieces
Read MoreWords v.s. Pictures in the Penny Press!
/The great Lev Grossman has a typically smart and interesting piece in last week’s Time (the issue with the hideous cover advertising 60 different stories inside), on a subject of perennial fascination: books translated into movies. I’ve long been on record with the audacious opinion that virtually every movie version ever filmed is better than [...]
Read MoreComics: The Shadow - Blood & Judgment
/Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! With some ample assistance from comics legend Howard Chaykin
Read MoreThe burgeoning human population is encountering new and strange pathogens every day - how long until one of them becomes the next HIV ... or Black Death?
Read MoreSix for a Start!
/The age-old publishing maxim (it’s actually a maxim for everything, but we’ll stay on our home ground), “Stick With What Works,” has few starker applications than the books-in-series that have long afflicted the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Long after whole forests were pulped to make endless “Gor” and “Lensman” books possible (although nothing could make them readable), [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Through the Eye of a Needle
/
The new book by the great Peter Brown examines a deep conflict: Christ specifically orders Christians to be poor, but Christians would rather not be, thanks just the same.
Read MoreRating the Blighters in the Penny Press!
/As we’ve so often noted about the Penny Press, the Lord giveth, and the Lord talketh out His ass. Such was certainly the case with last week’s TLS, in which the ‘debit’ column had an item that nearly made me spit up my Tatws Pum Munud in outrage. The offending piece was by Jonathan Benthall, [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Founders and Finance
/The newly-born United States was a disorganized and largely bucolic hodge-podge until three clear-eyed financiers - all of them immigrants - worked to create a new and more monetized system
Read MoreBook Review: Joseph Anton
/The great novelist tells the beguiling story of the man he became in order to escape a death sentence
Read MoreLucky Jim!
/Our book today is Kingsley Amis’ 1954 debut novel Lucky Jim, the recent New York Review of Books re-issue of which prompted a literary friend of mine to lament, “Do we really need this? Am I missing something, or is this thing just a boring, overpraised academia-novel that was never that good to begin with?” This [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Ice Castle
/To find their missing cousin, young heroes Daphne and Ivan must return to the magical land of Lexicon and confront yet more of its brain-teasing adventures.
Read More