Book Review: Lurid & Cute
/The main character of Adam Thirlwell's new novel has no redeeming qualities whatsoever - and he's sinfully easy to read about
Read MoreBook Review: Their Last Full Measure
/The tense and frantic final months of the American Civil War forms the backdrop for Joseph Wheelan's lively new book
Read MoreThe Civilization of the Renaissance!
/Our book today is The Civilization of the Renaissance, the brilliant 1860 masterpiece by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, but it’s not just any edition: I recently found (at my beloved Brattle Bookshop, of course) a copy of the beautiful oversized edition put out by the Phaidon Press in 1939 for the English-language book market in […]
Read MorePresident Lincoln's mercurial Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gets a full-dress biography that would have gladdened the heart of anybody who ever wanted to hit him with a shovel
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Language of the Dead!
/Our book today is Stephen Kelley’s The Language of the Dead (the prepositional phrase isn’t explicitly necessary to get your book featured on Mystery Monday, but it obviously doesn’t hurt…), the first in a planned series of murder mysteries taking place in rural England during the Second World War, when food and resources are being […]
Read MoreComics: Convergence #1!
/The latest big crossover event in DC Comics has now well and truly begun, although I’m predictably late getting around to writing about it here at Stevereads. It’s called “Convergence,” and part of the reason I’m late writing about it is that I’m still not entirely clear on what it IS. DC’s previous really big […]
Read MoreBook Review: James Merrill - Life and Art
/The poet James Merrill at long last gets the lavish soup-to-nuts biography he's always deserved
Read MoreBook Review: KL
/The sprawling system of concentration camps established by the Nazis gets its first comprehensive history
Read MoreBook Review: The Ransom of the Soul
/In his new book, Peter Brown offers a provocative and fascinating new look at the evolution of the Christian idea that you can be helped in the next life by how much moolah you fork over in this one
Read MoreRomance Roundup: April 2015!
/Our books today are three new romances hot off the presses, and they quite accidentally nagged at a small corner of my guilty conscience when it comes to my foremost guilty pleasure. In the past, veteran romance readers have accused me of disproportionately favoring historical romances over all other kinds, and although I initially bridled […]
Read MoreBook Review: Visions and Revisions
/From the novelist, critic, and columnist Dale Peck comes a series of autobiographical essays and reflections about life during the height of the AIDS epidemic
Read MoreBook Review: Madness in Civilization
/A fantastic, important new study traces the history of insanity in human history
Read MoreBook Review: France 1940
/The military collapse of France in 1940 has been a punch line and byword for decades, but a provocative new book argues that the traditional view is too simple
Read MoreA Preface to Donne!
/Our book today is another slim little thing, James Winny’s 1970 entrant in Scribners’ old “Preface” series, A Preface to Donne, which at the time joined John Purkis’s A Preface to Wordsworth and Lois Potter’s excellent A Preface to Milton – and which was needed more thoroughly than either volume, as any even casual student […]
Read MoreBook Review: One of Us
/In 2011, a man detonated a bomb in Oslo and then shot dozens of people on a nearby island before surrendering to police. A vivid new book tells the whole story of the victims - and the killer
Read MoreBook Review: Bonaparte, 1769-1802
/A gigantic new biography chronicles the rise-to-power of Napoleon Bonaparte
Read MoreMystery Monday: Inspector of the Dead!
/Our book today is Inspector of the Dead, the latest novel from former University of Iowa stalwart (and the man who introduced the character of Rambo to an unsuspecting world) David Morrell. It’s the second murder mystery of his that features one of the least likely detectives of them all: Thomas De Quincey, the notorious […]
Read MoreBook Review: Hitler's Shadow Empire
/In 1936 Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into backing General Franco in the Spanish Civil War; a new history powerfully re-interprets that fraught relationship
Read MoreBook Review: Ministers at War
/A new book tells the story of the War Cabinet Winston Churchill assembled to fight the Second World War
Read MoreBook Review: Secret Warriors
/Beyond the battles and trenches of the First World War, a dozen less glamorous but no less vital fights were being waged - in laboratories and darkrooms and publishing offices. A vibrant new book tells the story of the other World War I
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