Book Review: Europe Before Rome
/A profusely illustrated you-are-there look at the excavations into European prehistory
Read MoreBook Review: Furies
/The Italian Renaissance of Michelangelo and Raphael was built by - and traumatized by - the constant tramping of hired armies. A provocative new study looks at the birth-price of the modern era
Read MoreSix for the Regicide!
/Avunculicide would be just as accurate, since of course we’re referring to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who in 1483 became King of England after having disposed of the niggling little obstacle of the previous king of England, 14-year-old Edward V, who’d become king upon the death of his father, Edward IV, Richard’s brother. Young Edward [...]
Read MoreThird-Act Stumbling in the Penny Press!
/It was a decidedly non-literary day at Ye Olde PO Box: no Arion, no TLS, no London Review of Books, no New York Review of Books … not even the New York Times Book Review to further the ongoing necessary inquiry. Instead, almost as a warning of the lower elevations head, there was a new issue [...]
Read MoreThe Illustrious Prince!
/Our book today is E. Phillips Oppenheim’s 1910 thriller, The Illustrious Prince, which opens right away, on Page 1, with an inadvertent thrill delivered right over the heads of its contemporary readers and right to the reading cortex of its 21st Century audience. In the opening scene, a luxury liner has missed its evening tide [...]
Read MoreClassics Reissued: West with the Night
/The great travel-adventure classic gets a pretty new reprint
Read MoreBook Review: Ways of Going Home
/The newest novel from the newest Chilean literary wunderkind
Read MoreBook Review: Engineers of Victory
/A new history of the Second World War focuses on the mid-level thinkers and technicians whose innovations made the grand strategies work
Read MoreAbsent Friends: “Warm, funny, sad, true … It is Perfect”
/"The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it" wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes - most of the time - despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Read MoreFrom the BPL: Josiah for President!
/Josiah for President by Martha Bolton Zondervan, 2012 “If you can’t trust the Amish, who can you trust?” asks a gushing voter in Martha Bolton’s debut novel, Josiah for President, and like jesting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. Bolton may be a first-time novelist, but she’s an old hand at writing, with over [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Best of Youth
/In Michael Dahlie's new novel, an idle young millionaire ghost-writes a book for an arrogant Hollywood star
Read MoreIt’s the Little Things in the Penny Press!
/My usual one-two combination of The London Review of Books and the TLS always has a huge amount of long, meaty, scholarly piece of literary journalism – that’s why I’ve been coming back to them every week since before most of you were born. And this last week was no exception, with plenty of great, [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Money Run
/She's a master thief who wants to rob the world's richest man; he's a master assassin who wants to kill the world's richest man - what happens when they run headlong into each other in a glass-and-steel death-trap?
Read MoreBook Review: The Making of the First World War
/A new history of World War I looks at twelve fragile moments, twelve turning points when small factors determined very large outcomes
Read MoreBook Review: Antarctica
/Earth's frozen, forbidding continent is the subject of Gabrielle Walker's latest book
Read MoreBook Review: The Illicit Happiness of Other People
/The death of a talented teenage artist spins his family and friends into turmoil in Manu Joseph's incredibly accomplished second novel.
Read MoreBook Review: The Fall of the Stone City
/In the latest Ismail Kadare novel to be translated into English, an Albanian doctor invites the invading Nazis to an elaborate dinner at his house - but what exactly happens that night, to the strains of Schubert?
Read MoreBook Review: The World Until Yesterday
/Until comparatively recently, historically speaking, mankind existed in small hunter-gatherer societies without states or agriculture. Best-selling author Jared Diamond's latest book examines the possible up-side of those primitive edens.
Read MoreGeographica: Armchair!
/As usual, the latest National Geographic contained wonders – and as usual, many of those wonders were distinctly familiar to me! That’s one of the best things about the magazine, for those of its readers who’ve seen a bit of the world: the best photographers in the business work every month to bring it all [...]
Read MoreSix for the Bookworms!
/Since there’s bloody little else to do on these wretched state and federal holidays during which the holy Post Office is closed (and with a winter storm coming – that being something of a tradition for Inauguration Days I care about), we can get a lot of extra reading done on Martin Luther King Day. [...]
Read More