In Paperback: Life in a Shell
/A new paperback explores the mysteries of turtles
Read MoreBook Review: Year's Best Science Fiction
/The powerhouse annual science fiction anthology series turns thirty with a new collection drawn from all the sci-fi periodicals of the English-speaking world
Read MoreBook Review: The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht
/The great 20th century poet Anthony Hecht was also a charming and indefatigable letter-writer. A new volume does its best to capture the range and wit that captivated two generations of correspondents.
Read MoreFashion-hunting in the Penny Press!
/It’s fashion month in the Penny Press these days, which means the square-bound glossies are suddenly a bit thicker and much more tightly crammed with full-color full-page spreads of varied and frenzied incomprehensibility. As many of you will have no trouble believing, fashion is a mystery to me; not only do I completely lack the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Twelve Caesars
/The ancient Roman historian Suetonius wrote such a rollicking, gossipy book about the first twelve emperors that historians have been re-writing his book ever since
Read MoreBook Review: The Letters of T. S. Eliot
/The exhaustive Yale edition of the complete correspondence of T. S. Eliot reaches a very busy period in the life of Eliot the editor and businessman, working away at the center of a vast and fascinating literary world
Read MoreAnne Boleyn!
/Our book today is Anne Boleyn by Norah Lofts, written in 1974 when our author was the ripe old age of 75. But before all you Norah Lofts fans go shuffling to the bookshelf, rest assured that I’m not mixing up the title of Lofts’ great 1963 Anne Boleyn novel The Concubine; I’m referring instead [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Benjamin Britten - A Life For Music
/The great - and problematic - 20th century composer gets a broad-minded and intensely sensitive new biography
Read MoreClassics Reissued: Thoreau's Essays
/"In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of time and circumstances. They do not wait as man does ..." A beautiful new edition of Henry David Thoreau's essays.
Read MoreThe Swarm!
/Our book today is Frank Schatzing’s 2004 doorstop eco-thriller Der Schwarm, which was translated into English (by Sally-Ann Spencer) in 2006 as The Swarm, and it just naturally calls up a line from Cooper’s Creek by that literary household name, Alan Moorehead: “Nothing in this strange country seemed to bear the slightest resemblance to the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Extra Sensory
/The long-rumored psychic powers of the human brain get a high-spirited new examination.
Read MoreThe Life and Times of Viscount Falkland!
/Our book today is The Life and Times of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, a sturdy hardcover by J. A. R. Marriott put out by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1907, when King Edward was on the throne of England and John Marriott was a professor of history at Oxford and Lucius Cary, the second Viscount [...]
Read MoreThe Safety of the Longlist in the Penny Press!
/That annual literary freakshow, the Man Booker Prize, has resumed in earnest with the publication of the ‘long list’ of potential winners for the big prize announced in October. London bookies will now trumpet the odds of each candidate, and tepid discussions will spring up in the leafier groves of the Internet. In general, the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Long, Obstinate, and Bloody
/A crucial turning-point battle in the American Revolution is given an extensively detailed and tradition-challenging new history
Read MoreBook Review: The Warbler Guide
/Roger Tory Peterson called them "the butterflies of the bird world" - they're wood warblers, and when it comes to identifying and understanding them, Princeton University Press has published the Bible
Read MoreBehold the Man
/The meek and peaceful Jesus has become the standard Christian image of the Messiah. Religious scholar Reza Aslan's controversial new book shatters that image and replaces it with something very different: a violent revolutionary who came not to bring peace but a sword.
Read MoreThe Cecils of Hatfield House!
/Our book today is Lord David Cecil’s 1973 compendious charmer, The Cecils of Hatfield House, a zesty character-driven history of the many generations of the storied Cecil family which rose to prominence when canny William Cecil decided to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor (a relative term with the Cecils, but still) [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The White Princess
/"The Cousins' War" - Philippa Gregory's ongoing novelization of the Wars of the Roses - reaches an epic turning point in her latest book, about the precarious founding of the Tudor dynasty
Read MoreBook Review: The Men Who Lost America
/Clinton, Gage, Burgoyne, the Howe brothers - and of course Lord Cornwallis: their names are synonymous in the United States with bumbling defeat, but a rousing new book takes a fresh look at all these formerly infamous figures
Read MoreBook Review: The Anglo-Saxon World
/A wonderfully-illutrated new volume brings together the latest research about the glittering era that brought us the Sutton Hoo treasure, the epic of Beowulf, and the deep sediment of law
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