Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is The Last Ship by William Brinkley, a 1988 exponent of the whole sub-genre of military techno-fiction Tom Clancy had created virtually from scratch four years earlier with The Hunt for Red October – but also an exponent of a much older sci-fi tradition: the post-apocalyptic survival-story, along the lines of Alas, […]
Read MoreThe enigmatic and compelling aristocratic author Vita Sackville-West is the subject of an approachable new biography
Read MoreReading the cover story of the latest Harper’s, David Bromwich’s magisterial, damning assessment of the Obama presidency, certainly did no wonders for my lunch-time digestion. Just the first paragraph reads like a cold halibut across the face: Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the […]
Read MoreCelebrated biographer H. W. Brands has written the first full-dress of Ronald Reagan since the former president's death in 2004 - but does Reagan elude him, as he has so many biographers? Steve Donoghue reviews.
Read MoreOur book today is The Rise of Roscoe Paine, a delightful 1912 novel by the Joseph Lincoln, who died half a century ago but who, for half a century before that, enjoyed a very nice career as a novelist and balladeer, singing the praises of a gently mythologized Cape Cod in book after book, much […]
Read MoreOur book today is a good oldie reprinted for crass opportunistic motives: it’s the latest “Epic Collection” from Marvel Comics, The Avengers: Behold … The Vision, and the crass part isn’t far to seek: the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron is still in theaters worldwide and has already grossed north of $500 million with no […]
Read MoreA group of rescuers in Southern California treat the most delicate patients imaginable: injured hummingbirds
Read MoreA genuinely thought-provoking new work of science-writing probes the nature - and even the value - of noise
Read MoreFor my final romance round-up in May, I slouched back to my admitted favorite sub-genre, the Regency – and not your grandmother’s Regency (your grandmother, that is, not mine – there’s no documentary evidence that my dear Granny ever read a book in her incredibly long life, bless the dear) but this new richer and […]
Read MoreOn a chilly day in late May, 1918, American troops went into battle in the World War I for the first time - a gripping new history tells the story
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics come in packages that are ridiculously enticing, and the foremost current example of this has to be the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Angela Carter’s 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which here gets an absolutely stunning paperback designed by Lynn Buckley and illustrated in leering, lapel-grabbing black-and-white by Alex […]
Read MoreNow in paperback: a fascinating history of mankind's interactions with the most famous volcano in the world
Read MoreThe mad debacle of the Dardanelles campaign is now 100 years in the past, and to mark the anniversary, a classic account is reprinted
Read MoreA former deputy director of the CIA reflects on his time on the front lines in this frustrating memoir
Read MoreA former key player in the Coalition's conquest and administration of Iraq reflects on her time there
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics have been reprinted so many times in so many formats and years and fads that no further possible textual justification can ever be found for doing it again – instead, publishers have to think outside the book, have to look for nuances of presentation if they want to create something that feels […]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics mark a melancholy succession, and works in translation are particularly vulnerable to this. The old cherished translations of great works – the Rosemary Edmonds War and Peace, the E. V. Rieu Homer, the Dorothy Sayers Divine Comedy, and so on – begin to feel almost imperceptibly dated around the edges. If they’re […]
Read MoreA young monk goes on a desperate quest in the 12th century - to a fable city called Venetia
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics are legitimate scholarly landmarks. Not as many as you might expect, and for the clear reason that the overriding purpose of any classics-reprint line is actually the opposite of originality: a new Introduction here, a pretty new cover there, but the heart of Dover, Signet, Bantam, Penguin and all other reprint lines […]
Read MoreThe pioneering English Egyptologist William Bankes gets a smart and vivacious new biography
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.