Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is Kenneth Clark’s slim 1939 monograph Leonardo Da Vinci, here presented in the very pretty 1989 Penguin reprint in an extra-sized paperback with loads of illustrations. The old Pelican mass market paperback of the book also had loads of illustrations, mind you, but for binding reasons they were all lumped together in […]
Read MoreOur book today is Scottish author Ewart Hutton’s Dead People, the follow-up to his debut Good People (the latter’s staid title was given a private edge by the book’s plot; this current book provides no such edge, so its title is the equivalent of Murder Mystery, alas), and its basic premise will be familiar to […]
Read MoreOur book today is Carl Sagan’s intensely personal and snarkily intelligent 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, a reasoned cry of defiance against what Sagan, approaching the end of his life, viewed as the gathering forces of intolerance and stupidity. Sagan spent his entire life waging a smiling, well-mannered, […]
Read MoreOur book today is a steely, stunningly unsettling novella The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, best known today for her hefty works of nonfiction like The Meaning of Treason and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, works written after long periods of intense deliberation. This novella is a very different thing, as thin and […]
Read MoreCultured, erudite, and passionate, Louisa Catherine Adams had a long and fascinating life as wife to John Quincy Adams on the road to the presidency, and that life at long last has a superb biography
Read MoreRobert Graves lived to be 90.
Read MoreDeep in the Brazilian wilderness, Theodore Roosevelt and his son encounter a mysterious beast who kills without leaving any tracks
Read MoreA bookseller's daughter, a mad alchemist Medici prince, and a heroic Cornishman move the plot of Elizabeth Loupas's hugely enjoyable new historical novel
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics feel practically inevitable. When the great translator Royall Tyler brought out his groundbreaking edition of the fourteenth-century Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike in 2012 from the Viking press, it became one of that category, and now it’s arrived: a beautiful big paperback Penguin Classic of the Heike edition, which so [...]
Read MoreIdealistic young Mary Shelton finds love at the Tudor Court - but it's not the love her Queen has chosen for her
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Read MoreA morose misanthrope police superintendent investigates a killing in which the murderer traveled half-way around the world in order to murder a total stranger
Read MoreOur book today is the unsinkable 1950 Patricia Highsmith masterpiece Strangers on A Train, which wastes no time in leaping straight to the area of crime-fiction that always fascinated her: motive. Mystery novels love to play with all three of the tenets of crime – motive, means, and opportunity – but every author finds his [...]
Read MoreA key element of science fiction DNA is the whole concept of time travel, and a gigantic new anthology assembles all the greatest time travel stories ever told
Read MoreThe wife of England's King George II has been largely forgotten by history, but she was complimented by Swift, Pope, and Voltaire in her own day - and a new book brings her marvelously to life
Read MoreOur book today is Memoirs of an Editor, a big, bustling 1924 volume by Edward Mitchell, who was for a long time the editor-in-chief of the old New York Sun, a position he took over from his semi-legendary predecessor, Charles A. Dana, a brilliant and recondite figure who was always the smartest person in any [...]
Read MoreWill the latest age of man - dubbed the Anthropocene - be the last? A new book looks at the tremendous toll the human race has taken on its home planet
Read MoreOur book today is 1994′s Pictures of Perfection, one of the incredibly entertaining Dalziel & Pascoe mystery novels of the late, great Reginald Hill, although really I could be just as happy picking any of these delightful novels to re-read and praise here. Hill wrote mountains of prose (the full catalog may never be assembled, [...]
Read MoreOn a laid-back little Greek island, a sacred icon is forged, a local painter is dead … and a fat man is on the case
Read MoreA hugely enjoyable new novel tells the familiar story of Dr. Jekyll from Mr. Hyde's point of view - and will have its readers questioning who the real monster really is
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.