Book Review: Skeptic
/Popular debater and science writer Michael Shermer's latest book collects some of the columns he's written for Scientific American
Read MoreBook Review: The Lightkeepers
/Many kinds of violence haunt a remote California island chain when a nature photographer takes a one-year assignment there
Read MoreIslands and Lagoons … of Venice!
/Our book today is a gorgeous “coffee table book” from 1980 with the Vendome Press: Islands and Lagoons of Venice, with text by Peter Lauritzen and stunning photography by Fulvio Roiter. The book lavishly, lovingly celebrates the vast, strange world of the other Venice, the 200 square miles of lagoon, inlets, and islands sprawling around […]
Read MoreBook Review: Strange Gods
/Throughout human history, people have found reasons to change their religions - Susan Jacoby's brilliant new book examines the phenomenon of adopting strange gods
Read MoreInk Chorus: Never in Doubt!
/Our book today is Never in Doubt, a collection of book book reviews from stalwart bull terrier Peter Prescott, who reviewed books for Newsweek for two decades and adored our ragged fish-wrap art form with a sharp wit, a punchy prose style, and, underneath some thick plates of armor, a true believer’s heart. He was […]
Read MoreA Polar Vortex Romance Round-Up!
/Sometimes, the only fitting answer to a Polar Vortex plunge into sub-zero temperatures is a readerly plunge into the steamy world of romance novels. Curled up in bed, listening to the freezing sleet hit the window, I decided to indulge myself in a trio of sumptuous historical romances: Heir to the Duke by Jane Ashford […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome
/Popular French science-fantasy writer Serge Brussolo gets makes his debut appearance in English with a story of men and women who treasure-hunt in the dreams of other people
Read MoreBook Review: The Perfect Bet
/An illuminating new book takes readers inside the calculus of gambling
Read MorePilgrim at Tinker Creek!
/Our book today is one of those modern classics every reader should read: Annie Dillard’s great Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1975. In these pages – part memoir, part natural history, part crackpot seat-of-the-pants philosophy – she muses on the natural world of her surroundings in Virginia’s […]
Read MoreA Time in Rome!
/Our book today is Elizabeth Bowen’s winsome 1960 glory of place-writing, A Time in Rome, in which she blends history and travelogue and memoir in an entirely successful attempt to capture in words what the Rome and its environs had meant to her for half a century. As with everything else she wrote, whether it […]
Read MoreOn the Runways of Alpha Centauri This Season in the Penny Press!
/Fortunately, no matter how frustrating or confusing the Penny Press is on any given week, we’ll always still have the beacon of clarity that is high fashion.
Read MoreSend in the D-List in the Penny Press!
/The latest issue of Vanity Fair had an amusing little one-page squib that managed to provoke in me an old and often-provoked reaction. The piece, called “Unsung Superheroes,” is written by Scott Jacobson, Mike Sacks, and Ted Travelstead (don’t ask me why – the thing is 300 not particularly taxing words long; I have no […]
Read MoreLawrence Osborne in the Penny Press!
/I’m always pleased when one of my beloved lad-mags pauses from its barrage of plugs for $50,000 wristwatches and full-page ads for cigarettes in order to talk about books; it’s slightly encouraging to me, that the editors of these magazines sometimes think that in addition to grotesquely expensive status-symbol gimcracks and incipient lung cancer, young […]
Read MoreYet More Echo-Reviews in the Penny Press!
/The latest New York Review of Books, in addition to its usual spread of great reviews of books I haven’t read – the standout this time probably being Jacob Weisberg’s “We Are Hopelessly Hooked,” a review of a spate of new books on digital media that was full of great quotes (my two favorite: “We […]
Read MoreBook Review: Dog Run Moon
/The debut short story collection from a Montana fly-fishing guide
Read MoreFanny Burney!
/Just the other day, I happened to come across a disparaging comment about Fanny Burney (these are the kinds of circles I frequent, alas), and it’s stuck with me. The writer of the comment had no use for poor Fanny, remarking that the world would have been better all around if she’d never put pen […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: Death at La Fenice!
/Our book today is Death at La Fenice from way back in 1992, the very first of Donna Leon’s wildly popular murder mysteries set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, her steadfast and nondescript working-stiff sleuth. Now, in 2015, Leon has been writing Venice-based novels for a quarter of a century; they’ve sold millions […]
Read MoreBook Review: Apostle
/An author spends years traveling to the various final resting places of the Apostles - and comes back with an unsettlingly insightful new look at the early history of Christianity
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Tale of Tales!
/Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen before, take an earlier superb work of scholarship or translation and basically save it from obscurity by adding it to the Classics lineup. In our case today, the name of that obscurity would be Wayne State University Press, which in 2007 originally published Nancy Canepa’s translation of Giambattista Basile’s […]
Read MoreA Brief History of Rome!
/Our book today is from 1885: the Brief History of Rome put out in New York as part of the old Barnes’ One-Term Series that was designed to put short, affordable one-volume introductions to then-staple subjects like history, science, and language into classrooms in the state of New York (and beyond – many’s the tiny […]
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