Book Review: Where Are My Books?
/One by one, young Spencer's books are disappearing at night - can he figure out where they're going before they're all gone?
Read MoreBook Review: The Meaning of the Library
/A new book celebrating the library's thousands of years of history and constantly-changing cultural role is filled with sharp essays
Read MoreWhen the Going Was Good!
/Our book today a neat little 1946 banquet of travel-writing, When the Going Was Good, by Evelyn Waugh, that pomaded prince of the Seasoned Pro class of travel-writers. The book is a crushed compilation of four earlier works: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and – Waugh stressed the title wasn’t of his choosing – Waugh […]
Read MoreBook Review: Voltaire's Revolution
/For the better part of a century, Voltaire waged a sometimes solitary battle against the iniquities of organized religion. A great new book brings together fresh translations of some of the philosopher's most biting works.
Read MoreCleopatra’s Wedding Present!
/Our book today is Robert Tewdwr Moss’s 1997 cult classic, Cleopatra’s Wedding Present: Travels through Syria, a strange and often lovely volume that’s also inescapably sad, since right after completing a final draft of the book, the author was left bound and gagged by robbers in his London apartment and suffocated before he could be […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Real Lives of Roman Britain
/Archeological research has uncovered more than ever about the ordinary men and women who lived in Britain during the centuries of Roman occupation. A lively new book assesses what we know
Read MoreUnder a Sickle Moon!
/Our book today is Peregrine Hodson’s Under a Sickle Moon, his 1986 account of the 1984 trek he made through over a thousand miles of Afghanistan, and the book is a perfect little reminder of the three kinds of travelogue-writers: The Whining Interloper, The Seasoned Pro, and The Professional Alien. If the name “Peregrine Hodson” […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Blooding
/Matthew Hawkwood, James McGee's super-competent soldier-turned-spy, returns in another adventure, this time trapped in America during the War of 1812
Read MoreThe Book of Dogs!
/Our book today is The Book of Dogs, a lovely leatherbound thing put out by the National Geographic Society back in 1919, subtitled “An Intimate Study of Mankind’s Best Friend.” The text is by Ernest Harold Baynes, with plenty of black-and-white photographs supplementing color illustrations by Louise Agassiz Fuertes and Hashime Murayama, and although semi-official […]
Read MoreBook Review: Brothers in Blood
/In the latest Roman historical novel from old pro Simon Scarrow, two heroic legionaries are chasing an infamous local warlord in Britannia - and facing treachery from within their own ranks
Read MoreThe Five of Hearts!
/Our book today is Patricia O’Toole’s wonderful 1990 biography of a set, The Five of Hearts, subtitled “An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918.” The five in question are Adams himself, his wife Clover, John Hay and his wife Clara, and Clarence King, an effusive and flamboyant “entrepreneur” who shines just a […]
Read MorePainful to Nice Feelings
/He sailed around Cape Horn and wrote a classic about it, and he fought for the downtrodden in Boston courts for thirty years - he was Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and he's the subject of a thought-provoking new biography.
Read MoreBook Review: The Eagle in Splendour
/"How a Court LOOKS," remarked a courtier to one of England's more successful modern-day monarchs, "is at least as important as how a Court WORKS." A re-issued study from Philip Mansel looks at form and function in the court of Napoleon Bonaparte
Read MoreBook Review: For God and Kaiser
/"Austria," quipped Talleyrand, "has the tiresome habit of always being beaten" - but Richard Bassett's vigorous new history of the Imperial Austrian Army begs to differ!
Read MoreBook Review: Braddock's Defeat
/A French army and a British army stumble upon each other in the wilderness of the New World, and their conflict changes the nature of the world's biggest war
Read MoreBook Review: Rome's Revolution
/The epic change in ancient Rome from a Republic to an Empire hinged on one man: Julius Caesar. A new history tells the familiar story.
Read MoreBook Review: The Two-State Delusion
/A veteran state conflict analyst looks at the mother of such conflicts: the long strife between Israel and Palestine
Read MoreBook Review: The Last Leaves Falling
/A teenager in Kyoto tries to face the last months of his life as a samurai would - with a little help from his friends
Read MoreBook Review: The Meursault Investigation
/The famous bloody encounter at the center of Albert Camus' novel The Stranger is re-imagined from a new perspective in Kamel Daoud's widely-praised debut
Read MoreBook Review: The Black Coat
/In the wake of Bangladesh's bloody Liberation War, a hapless nonentity suddenly finds himself impersonating a beloved national leader
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