Penguins on Parade: Sagittarius Rising!
/A rip-snorting new Penguin Classic gives us the memoir of a teenager who flew fighter planes during World War I
Read MoreMystery Monday: Medicus!
/Our book today is Medicus, the 2006 debut Roman murder mystery by Ruth Downie starring wry, brooding medical man Gaius Petreius Ruso, who’s chosen, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness, to respond to the death of his father and a painful divorce back in Rome by moving to the farthest reach of the Empire, distant Britannia, and […]
Read MoreIn Paperback: Dark Omens
/Dauntless mosaic-layer Libertus returns for another side-job of crime-solving in Rosemary Rowe's latest gripping murder mystery set in Roman Britain
Read MoreA Literary History of Rome!
/Our books today are two oldies but goodies, A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (1909) and A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927) by J. Wright Duff, who labored over them for a huge chunk of his life and […]
Read MoreThe Battle for Justice in Palestine
/A controversial author's latest and most devastating indictment of Israel's policies toward its Palestinian citizens and neighbors
Read MoreBook Review: Bumble Bees of North America
/A lavishly-illustrated guide book to the bumble bees of North America, in all their busy glory
Read MoreAcademic Presses – and Pressing Academics – in the Penny Press!
/Naturally, Scott Sherman’s well-done article in The Nation on the parlous state of the university press grabbed my attention. Sherman writes about the roughly 100 university presses in the United States but concentrates especially on the vast majority of them that don’t rest on “the feathery cushion of an endowment” but rather face the hurly-burly […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Steady Running of the Hour
/The life and great loves of a legendary 1920s mountain-climber reach out from the past to grab the life of a young 1990s man in Justin Go's hugely ambitious debut novel
Read MoreGenji Days!
/Our book today is a delightful curiosity called Genji Days by Edward Seidenseticker, whose 1976 translation of Murakami Shikibu’s great epic novel The Tale of Genji was as thoroughly the definitive Genji of his generation as Arthur Waley’s had been for the previous generation – or, indeed, Royall Tyler’s 2001 version is currently. For thousands […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: Shot on Location!
/Our book today is Stan Cutler’s 1994 mystery novel Shot on Location, a snapping-good Hollywood whodunit starring the unlikely duo of fifty-something “fixer” tough guy Rayford Goodman and twenty-something gay writer Mark Bradley – a duo who might never have met each other except that Mark Bradley’s seedy publisher, Pendragon Press, has secured the […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Marathon Conspiracy
/Two missing girls, a very dead tyrant, and the possibility of a rampaging bear are only a few of the plot-twists in Gary Corby's latest murder mystery set in the Athens of Pericles
Read MoreThis Thing of Darkness!
/Our book today is This Thing of Darkness, a whopping-long 2005 historical novel by Harry Thompson about the fateful voyage of the HMS Beagle to Tierra del Fuego in 1828. The ship was captained by 23-year-old Robert FitzRoy, and of course its most famous passenger was the young amateur naturalist Charles Darwin. But Thompson’s novel […]
Read MoreBook Review: Arctic Summer
/The fateful trip E. M. Forster took to India in 1912 was the inspiration for his greatest novel - and it's likewise the inspiration for a new novel from the author of "The Good Doctor"
Read MoreBook Review: Young God
/In this spare and violent debut, a 13-year-old girl from Appalachia enters a lawless life
Read MoreBack to the ’90s in the Penny Press!
/The 1990s came rushing back into the spotlight for me today in the Penny Press, first in the latest Vanity Fair, which had not only an entertainingly angry piece by Lili Anolik on the whole culture-altering media circus of the O. J. Simpson trial, and then a piece written by Monica Lewinsky, whose scandal with […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Norman Conquest
/That same old grand story - William of Normandy's daring capture of England in 1066 - gets a spiffy new history
Read MoreA May Book-Haul!
/The rest of the world may be unpredictable (earthquakes, tidal waves, polar ice-caps summarily melting, a snowstorm and a tornado on the same day in Colorado, 40-degree temperature drops in Boston in a 10-hour period, etc.), but one thing can always be counted on in a bookworm’s life: the need for acquiring more books. I […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind!
/Our book today is Michael Pearce’s 1991 novel The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, the fourth (and my favorite) in Pearce’s long-running series of novels set in Edwardian Cairo and starring a blandly resolute Welshman named Gareth Owen in his capacity as the Mamur Zapt, a strange kind of hybrid police detective-Secret Police Czar […]
Read MoreBook Review: Philology
/The complicated and far-reaching intellectual endeavor of philology is the subject of a magnificent new history that has an angry edge of its own
Read MoreThe Song of Fire and Equivocation in the Penny Press!
/The latest Rolling Stone serves up a double-dish of delights for all those rabid fans out there of HBO’s Game of Thrones - and the books that inspired the show: first, there’s an interview with pouting cover-boy Kit Harington (who was just on the cover of GQ and half a dozen other magazines, in every accompanying interview reciting the […]
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