Book Review: Nelson - The Sword of Albion
/A monumental deck-clearing two-volume biography of Admiral Horatio Nelson reaches its thundering conclusion
Read MoreIn the Penny Press: Esquire and Outside
/I thought my week’s Penny Press highlights had already passed, but the hits just keep coming! The New Yorker issue sporting the now-famous Bert & Ernie cover, for instance, features a great piece by Louis Menand called “The Color of Law,” about the systematic suppression of the black vote in the American South – an [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Gettysburg - The Last Invasion
/In a magnificent new history, the cataclysmic turning-point battle of the American Civil War is studied in meticulous detail
Read MoreBook Review: Our Lives, Our Fortunes & Our Sacred Honor
/Richard Beeman's new book covers some familiar - sacred? - ground
Read MoreThree out of Many in the Penny Press!
/As I’ve had occasion to note more than once here at Stevereads, one of the things I love most about the continuing bounty of the Penny Press is the unpredictability of it all. Talented freelancers are always getting drunk with each other at parties, sharing soccer pitches in the glaring sun, ogling each other in [...]
Read MoreJason & Medeia!
/Our book today is John Gardner’s 1973 epic poem Jason & Medeia, and it … screeching halt, right? Yes, “epic poem” – a literary form about as dead as the dodo, an intentionally, defiantly recherche choice for any modern-day author to make, a thumb in the eye of prospective new readers, a pretentious fling of [...]
Read MoreThe View from Pompey’s Head!
/Our book today is Hamilton Basso’s 1954 runaway bestseller The View from Pompey’s Head, which brought its fifty-year-old author the one thing he’d once upon a time wanted more than anything from the world, the one thing he’d slowly, gradually convinced himself he’d never have: renown. The book was a huge hit. It spent close [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Deprivation
/A young man slips in and out of seductive dream realities in Alex Jeffers' fantastic latest novel
Read MoreKeeping Up with the Tudors: Him Again
/In the famous jingle 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,' Katherine Parr comes last - the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. But she was far more than that - scholar, regent, and passionate young woman - as a new Tudor historical novel attempts to portray
Read MoreIn Paperback: The Long Road to Antietam
/The bloodiest day in United States history is the subject of Richard Slotkin's riveting book, now out in paperback
Read MoreBeat to Quarters!
/Our book today is C. S. Forester’s 1937 canon-shot of a Napoleonic sea-novel, Beat to Quarters (published in England as, sigh, The Happy Return), the book that introduced the character of Captain Horatio Hornblower to the world and single-handedly re-invigorated a sub-genre that had been quiescent for a century. The story is taut. Hornblower’s ship, [...]
Read MoreIn Paperback: 2312
/In Kim Stanley Robinson's epic space opera - now out in paperback - the mankind of two centuries hence has conquered space and colonized the solar system, but as usual, it carries its own dark side wherever it goes
Read MoreGeographica: Hunting Songbirds
/As we’ve noted in the past, the wonders of National Geographic – unparalleled anywhere else in the Penny Press – come with a price tag. Just as the magazine is capable of infusing your day with the curiosity and sheer joy of exploration (the two exultations on which it was founded), so too is it [...]
Read MorePope-enabling in the Penny Press!
/Just the other day, at the bookstore, a sane-and-normal-seeming customer asked me for a “fair” biography of Hitler. When I stared at her, she elaborated: a biography that wasn’t “slanted,” that had no “axe to grind,” that reflected the fact that although Hitler might have been an evil man, he was also indisputably a great [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Disraeli - The Romance of Politics
/Tradition has it that Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote his novels to make a name (and a fortune) for himself with the British public, but a thrilling new book wonders if he didn't also do it to re-shape reality itself - in his favor.
Read MoreIn Paperback: The Malice of Fortune
/Two of the most famous names of the Italian Renaissance - Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci - team up to untangle a series of horrific murders!
Read MoreBook Review: Horace and Me
/A columnist for the Financial Times looks at what the Roman poet Horace has meant to him over the years
Read MoreThe Iron Lady in the Penny Press!
/Ever since Margaret Thatcher died in April and the press set about heaping ordure on her still-warm corpse, I’ve been busily, sadly reading every notice, just as I did for Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, and just as I’m sure I will for Mikhail Gorbachev. In Thatcher’s case, the sheer intensity of the [...]
Read MoreReading Mary Plain in the Penny Press!
/The July issue of Vanity Fair has many standard features that are depressing. First and most noticeably, there’s the cover story-hand job common to most glossy magazines; in this case it’s a ‘profile’ of Hollywood’s current top box office Everyman, Channing Tatum, whose he-man pouting on the cover over the banner reading “Channing Tatum: An [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Silence of Animals
/The popular philosopher returns to the ideas that made him famous: that man is an animal, that optimism is misguided, and that the very idea of progress is just a re-heated left-over from the zeals of Christianity.
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