Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Lady Jane Grey was famously Queen of England for less than a fortnight before being executed by Queen Mary I; Elizabeth Fremantle's new book takes us into the world of Lady Jane's two sisters, adrift in a royal court that can't afford to trust them.
Read MoreOur book today is a bit of a specialty item, I readily admit: it’s the sturdy volume commissioned and printed in order to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the venerable Boston Atheneum, Boston’s great private library, and right away we’re on squishy ground, since the long and torturous history of the Atheneum could admit […]
Read MoreThe villainous Captain Cook from "Peter Pan" stars in Lisa Jensen's new novel - but it's a far more complex and sympathetic version of the character than Neverland fans will remember
Read MoreThe dog days of summer have settled into place (although it’s resolutely refusing to feel that way in the entire eastern half of North America), and all my young friends over on BookTube are happily ensconced in making their July book-videos – very much including the book “hauls” they somehow manage to take in despite […]
Read MoreDid the cataclysmic First World War actually have a hidden peace-dividend? Did it change the vocabulary of rapprochement forever? A vigorous new study makes a daring case
Read MoreOur book today is 1981’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell, the pen name taken by Sarah Cockburn, the witty and delightful sister of famed muckraking journalists Patrick, Alexander, and Andrew Cockburn. She was a London barrister in the eccentric Rumpole mode, and in the down-time from her busy legal profession, she wrote murder […]
Read MoreOne of the foremost historians of the First World War offers a comprehensive and brutal overview of the conflict that gave birth to the modern world
Read MoreOur book today is the utterly charming A Gathering of Shore Birds, a 1960 compilation of the wonderful bird-life columns Dr. Henry Marion Hall wrote for Audubon Magazine more than half a century ago. The editors at Devon-Adair (as the outfit used to be in palmier days, happy and sane) had the inspired notion to […]
Read MoreA gripping account of the final days of the inept, tottering Austro-Hungarian empire - and the military apocalypse it helped to usher in
Read MoreThe discovery of Richard III's skeleton in 2012 has flushed a number of books about the legendary dark monarch back into print - and none more welcome than this snappy volume by veteran biographer Desmond Seward
Read MoreNaturally, I was eager to read Tom Junod’s piece in the new Esquire, “The State of the American Dog,” which is about the unfair stigmatizing of pit bulls in America and their subsequent skyrocketing execution rates in animals shelters across the country. And on a prose level, the piece itself doesn’t disappoint: Junod is a […]
Read MoreA discontented English housewife impulsively kills her husband and is then faced with the logistical problem of what to do with his body. In Natalie Young's chillingly readable new novel, that housewife does what comes naturally
Read MoreIn Sally Beauman's new novel, a young girl sent to Egypt for her health becomes entangled in dramatic events surrounding Howard Carter's discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb ...
Read MoreThe boozy, gossipy author of "The Life of Johnson" was a working journalist-hack for the whole of his life, but hardly any of that material has been cleaned up and presented to the modern reader - until now, in a groundbreaking new volume from Yale University Press
Read MoreOne of the greatest British Prime Ministers of them all gets an authoritative new biography
Read MoreOur book today is The Third Reich in Power, the massive 2005 middle block volume in Richard Evans’s enormous Nazi Germany trilogy, the first volume of which covers the Hitlerian rise to power and is necessarily the sketchiest of the three and the third volume of which, The Third Reich at War (which I reviewed […]
Read MoreBabe Ruth, Mayor Walker, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Parker - New York City in the Jazz Age was a bristling landscape of giants, most of them from out of town. A vast and enthralling new history tells the stories of the people who made the Big Apple.
Read MoreOur book today is A Face Turned Backward, the 1999 second installment in Lauren Haney’s delightful series of murder mysteries set in ancient Egypt and featuring stalwart (and easy on the eyes) Lieutenant Bak, commander of the Medjay police force in the frontier town of Buhen during the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. The book’s […]
Read MoreDiplomat, author, congresswoman, power broker, playwright - Clare Boothe Luce crammed an enormous amount of living into her life, and the concluding volume of Sylvia Jukes Morris's essential biography gives it all the sparkling narration it deserves
Read MoreA generous new collection of essays by the legendary Joseph Epstein
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.