Book Review: Sicily
/Veteran historian John Julius Norwich attempts to cram over 800 years of Sicilian history into 300 pages - and because he's John Julius Norwich, he very nearly succeeds
Read MoreCache Lake Country!
/Our book today is John Rowland’s warm and wonderful 1947 classic Cache Lake Country, ostensibly about the author’s small rough-living getaway cabin deep in the vast Ontario North Woods, although as Rowland makes clear at the outset, the quiet and sheer beauty of the place almost abstracts the place from any map or guidebook: On […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Fall
/Federal contractor Jack Taylor takes an unprecedented high-altitude space jump - but when he breaks the sound barrier and makes his landing, he finds himself in a different reality
Read MoreRomance Roundup: July 2015!
/When it comes to genre fiction, could there be any words more encouraging than “First in a New Series”? Mysteries, sci-fi, and especially fantasy and romance tend to favor books-in-series to an absolutely exorbitant extent, to the point where by the time you happen to run across a series that might want to read, you […]
Read MoreBook Review: Last First Snow
/In Max Gladstone's latest "Craft" sequence novel, what looks like a straightforward neighborhood gentrification suddenly threatens to unleash the wrath of the gods themselves
Read MoreBook Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction, 2015
/The latest monumental anthology from Gardner Dozois of the best the sci-fi genre has to offer
Read MoreCritical Venting in the Penny Press!
/As I’ve noted on many occasions, book-reviewing can be tricky business for people who aren’t me. Most reviewers have actual personal lives, for instance, and I’ve heard that those can take up time and effort, entail trips to Ikea, and sometimes lead the unwary into the wilds of Canada. Most reviewers likewise devote ungawdly number […]
Read MoreBook Review: Beyond Words
/In his beautifully-written new book, ecologist Carl Safina takes a broader look at the emotional and mental lives of nonhuman animals
Read MoreBook Review: In a Dark Wood
/A professor of Italian clings to Dante's Divine Comedy when confronted with an unthinkable tragedy in his own life
Read MoreBook Review: Joan of Arc
/The half-legendary Maid of Orleans gets a refreshingly wide-angled new history from Helen Castor
Read MoreBook Review: The Quiet Man
/A memoir of the first President Bush, written by his former Chief of Staff
Read MoreBook Review: Palimpsest
/In a mere 200 pages on the history of writing, Matthew Battles takes readers from ancient China and Sumeria to Gutenberg to - oh my, are we out of time already?
Read MoreDisasters Big and Small in the Penny Press!
/The Penny Press this week featured a long article on a remorseless natural disaster, something that strikes without warning, wantonly destroys property, and inflicts untold pain and misery on humans around the world. I refer, of course, to corgis. Specifically, to a wonderfully wonky article in the latest Vanity Fair by Michael Joseph Gross about […]
Read MoreBook Review: Wolves on the Hunt
/Far from the popular image of ravenous killing machines, wolves are actually surprisingly cautious predators who carefully weigh the risks they take, as a stunning new study illustrates
Read MoreBook Review: Dark Orbit
/A distant planet crackling with "dark energy" holds mind-boggling secrets for the crew of humans sent to explore it
Read MoreBook Review: Pretty Is
/Years ago, two young girls were abducted and held for two months by a mysterious stranger; in the present, in Maggie Mitchell's terrific debut novel, these women are now confronted with the suspicion that a part of their childhood ordeal is very much alive.
Read MoreBook Review: Last to Die
/Military historian Stephen Harding tells the poignant story of the last soldier killed in World War II
Read MoreSummer – kinda – reading in the Penny Press!
/The always-delightful “Summer Reading” issue of The Weekly Standard came out recently (with its typically witty cover, only this one, unlike all the earlier classics of its kind, worries that its central joke will be missed by the general readership – so the punch line, “The Turn of the Screw,” is actually spelled out, just […]
Read MoreBook Review: Time Salvager
/In the future, a vast corporation sends operatives back in time to loot the past, and those operatives have one rule above all others: bring nobody back with you. When one of those operatives breaks that rule, Wesley Chu's novel takes off
Read MoreBook Review: The Lagoon
/When enigmatic aliens plunge down in the ocean off the coast of Nigeria, three very different humans encounter them - and watch as the world is changed forever
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