Book Review: George Washington - Gentleman Warrior
/A born warrior striving to become a refined gentleman, or a refined gentleman striving to learn a warrior's ways? A new book looks at Washington the military commander
Read MoreNotes and Cribbage in the Penny Press!
/A satisfyingly literary core of The New Yorker this week, which is always pleasing and this time helped to compensate for certain lacks of satisfaction found elsewhere in the 11 November issue. It was great fun, for instance, to read Dan Chiasson’s nice long look at the poet Marianne Moore and to read his generally [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Divine Fury
/They've always been among us, those rare individuals we call geniuses - but the distinction's meaning has subtly altered over the centuries. It's a big, interesting subject, boiled down by Darrin McMahon into a short, interesting book
Read MoreSuperman: Man of Steel: Believe!
/Our book today is a little pamphlet-sized thing newly published by DC Comics and triple-titled Superman Man of Steel Believe, collecting ten quick backup stories taken from various Superman comics titles over the last fifteen years. The cover features a little logo reminding readers that the character of Superman is celebrating the 75th anniversary of [...]
Read MoreBurying the Leaders in the Penny Press!
/One of the signature ironies of modern-day print book reviewing is on full display in the November 21st New York Review of Books, and since this particular irony irritates me, I was on edge all during my krocan peceny na slanine lunch. The irony in question here will be familiar to every owner of a [...]
Read MoreBook Review - Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
/A great conductor writes a great biography about a great composer!
Read MoreDinosaur in a Haystack!
/Our book today is the late Stephen Jay Gould’s 1995 essay collection Dinosaur in a Haystack, but no matter which of Gould’s dozen essay collections I revisit, the little pang of that “late” is always the same: even after more than a decade, there is no settlement with this man’s death – the present-day intellectual [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Churchill and the King
/King George VI and Winston Churchill forged a remarkable working relationship during the trying years of World War II - a new book looks at how it happened, and why
Read MoreThe Mandelbaum Aeneid!
/Our book today is Allen Mandelbaum’s 1971 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, with thirteen drawings by Barry Moser, a fine, collection-worthy volume that I have as a sturdy deep-green paperback from the University of California Press and that I’ve read probably two dozen times – a reflection, probably, of the oddly questing nature of my relationship [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Governor's Lady
/Strong-willed Southern governor Cooper Lanier's husband is running for president, and she's learning things about him she'd rather not know in Robert Inman's warm and involving new novel
Read MoreReliable – and Otherwise – Old Hands in the Penny Press!
/When you read as many magazines as I do, you quickly learn to tell the players without a scorecard. There are always newcomers on the scene, but there’s also a fairly small cadre of old-hand regulars who turn up wherever the money (and the readership) is good. These old hands can be relied upon to [...]
Read MoreIn the Modern Library: The Mill on the Floss!
/To hear Bennett Cerf tell the story (or to read his well-shaped and non-actionable ‘reminiscence’ of it in his 1977 book At Random), the Modern Library in its current incarnation was born of equal parts financial desperation and marital infidelity – both being experienced in acute amounts in 1925 by publishing schmoozer and would-be Broadway [...]
Read MoreMeg!
/Our book today is Steve Alten’s 1997 classic Meg, and it’s a salient reminder that some modern-day classics sneak up on us, unfolding their brilliance only gradually, like a delicate lotus blossom. Those of us who’ve been fans of giant-killer-shark novels from the beginning (that beginning being, of course, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: 'Mr. President'
/First in war, first in peace, first in line for the powers of a god
Read MoreBonfire of the Inanities
/A murder, a trip to the dump, and oh yah - September 11. That wacky Thomas Pynchon is at it again!
Read MoreBook Review: Nefertiti in the Flak Tower
/The great critic and memoirist Clive James has a volume of new poems doing some very old things
Read MoreBook Review: Octopus!
/The strangest, most alien creatures on the Earth have three hearts and big, unfathomable brains - and, famously, eight arms. It's the sprawling family of octopus species, and they get a soup-to-nuts examination in Katherine Harmon Courage's new book
Read MoreBook Review: The Spanish Queen
/King Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, takes center stage in a new novel by Tudor historian Carolly Erickson
Read MoreBook Review: The Urban Bestiary
/Coyotes prowl our golf courses, cougars haunt our bike-trails, and owls skinny-dip in our bird-baths - a new book looks at the wild animals that fill in the spaces of human cities
Read MoreBook Review: Naturalists at Sea
/When the South Pacific opened up for Western exploration, 'experimental gentlemen' swarmed there to make discoveries - and to make history
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