Book Review: Queen Anne - Patroness of Arts
/John Anderson Winn's thumpingly good new book studies the life and reign of Queen Anne through the least likely focus of them all - and succeeds wonderfully on all counts
Read MoreBook Review: The Land of the Elephant Kings
/One of the hard-chancing successors of Alexander the Great grabbed most of Asia when Alexander died - and then that successor and his successors worked desperately hard to hold onto it all
Read MoreComics: Shopping for Art!
/It’s always a thing I feel a little bit ashamed to admit, but there it is: I go to comic books mainly for their artwork. I know all about the brilliance of today’s comics writing – I hear about it all the time from comics aficionados, that today’s industry writers are smarter and more literate […]
Read MoreComics: The Legacy of Thanos
/The super-villain glimpsed at the end of the mega-hit "Avengers" movie casts a long shadow in the comic books where he was born - a new Marvel Comics graphic novel fills in some of the blanks
Read MoreBook Review: Down the Shore
/A debut novel follows a charismatic young man's partying days from New Jersey all the way to Scotland and back and charts his downfall as well
Read MoreBook Review: The Nile
/The entire vast and vivid history of Egypt is outlined to the reader as Toby Wilkinson's charming new book makes its way down the Nile
Read MoreNotes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The City on the Edge of Forever!
/The 1967 episode of the original Star Trek TV series “The City on the Edge of Forever” comes up almost necessarily in any discussion of the franchise as a whole. Fans routinely rank it as one of the best episodes of the original series, and a smaller sub-set of those fans, myself included, maintain that […]
Read MoreBook Review: Independence
/The complicated history of the American Revolution gets its best examination in a generation in Thomas Slaughter's new book
Read MoreBook Review: Stephen Crane - A Life of Fire
/The young author of "The Red Badge of Courage" is the subject of a lively and very readable new biography
Read MoreBook Review: The Explorers
/Popular writer Martin Dugard offers a new book about history's great explorers, men and women who thought outside the box, pushed the envelope, lived every day as if it were their last, ate their vegetables, and voted three times for Ronald Reagan
Read MoreBook Review: The Battle of Lepanto
/In 1571 the Christian West and the Muslim East clashed in an epic sea-battle, and when it was over, painters, writers, and poets echoed it in their works. The latest I Tatti volume collects a bounty of those responses
Read MoreBook Review: No Country
/Two friends flee famine-parched Ireland for opposite ends of the world in this big new historical novel
Read MoreBook Review: The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar
/A man adopts a smart, fussy owl - and the relationship completely changes his life
Read MoreSix More for the Scribblers!
/A good many of you responded favorably to that last “Six for the Scribblers” writer-biography round-up (and some of you pointed out that the entry didn’t, in fact, include six biographies but instead only five, against which my only lame defense is to note that this is “Stevereads” not “Stevecounts”), and since there are EVER […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Novel - A Biography
/A luminous - and enormous - new account of the novel's colorful history takes readers on a fun and fast-paced tour of fiction from Fielding to Diaz, with innumerable stops in between
Read MoreBook Review: The Bombers and the Bombed
/Even in its truncated US edition, Richard Overy's great new history of aerial bombing during WWII has much to offer its readers
Read MoreThe Travels of Jaimie McPheeters!
/Our book today is Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1958 historical novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which made as much of a splash as any book could reasonably be expected to make. It sold briskly (thanks to an innovatively energetic ad campaign); it garnered an enviable collection of critical praise (The New York Times called it […]
Read MoreThe Allure of the Islands in the Penny Press!
/Conde Nast Traveler’s latest issue is their regular celebration of islands, which the magazine’s fantastic new editor-in-chief Pilar Guzman justifies with elegant simplicity: Everything just tastes, looks, and feels better on an island. (It’s a little like how airplane altitude adds two starts – and many more tears – to every movie experience.) Maybe it’s […]
Read MoreSix for the Scribblers!
/Our books today are six sterling choices from that strangest of all biographical sub-genres, the literary biography. A writer friend of mine (too soon gone, but his books live on, which is kind of the whole point, isn’t it?) summed up the strangeness rather well one day while we were prowling the Brattle bargain-carts when […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Literary Churchill
/The man we think of as the quintessential politician was first and foremost a working author, as an amazing new assessment makes clear
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