Book Review: The Swimmer
/A preoccupation with endings characterizes the tenth collection from poet John Koethe
Read MoreBook Review: The Rise of a Prairie Statesman
/The first of a projected two-volume biography of Senator and Democratic Party standard-bearer George McGovern
Read MoreComics: If Asgard Should Perish!
/Our book today is a gem from 2010: a Marvel Premiere Edition called If Asgard Should Perish, with writing by Len Wein, artwork by John Buscema, and glorious coloring by Glynis Wein. This volume – which I somehow hadn’t known existed, and which I found just the other day in the used-book basement of the […]
Read MoreA Trip to the Harvard Book Store!
/When I have bookish guests coming to Boston, one natural destination is the Harvard Book Store over in Cambridge, a great shop lavishly stocked with both new and used books. Since I haven’t worked in Cambridge in decades, I tend not to make my way out there in the normal course of my week – […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Year of the Runaways
/A complex and moving novel about a trio of young men who leave their native India in search of work
Read MoreThe Books … of Venice! Gondola Days!
/Our book today is that incredibly durable classic of Venice books, Gondola Days by the redoubtable artist, novelist, and all-around overachiever F. Hopkinson Smith, who wrote it, illustrated it, and basked in its success in 1897. He’d written quite a few books prior to this one, and he’d go one to write quite a few […]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Book of Magic!
/Some Penguin Classics don’t look like Penguin Classics, which is a trifle odd when you consider how instantly recognizable the Penguin brand is to book-buyers, but you certainly won’t hear me complaining when the results are as nifty as The Book of Magic, a big new anthology of supernatural literature “from Antiquity to the Enlightenment,” […]
Read MoreBook Review: The King's Bed
/A lively new book gives readers a mistress-by-mistress recounting of the reign of Charles II
Read MoreBook Review: Battle of the Atlantic
/Atlantic shipping was the lifeline of Great Britain during the Second World War, and the Nazis knew it just as well as the Allies did. A thrilling new book recounts the sprawling, war-long Battle of the Atlantic
Read MoreRomance Roundup: Regency Rakes!
/In the world of Regency romances, few things are more tempting to authors than a good old-fashioned rakehell, a well-born dandy whose main pleasure in life is seducing, deflowering, and abandoning all the ladies of the fashionable ton, from wide-eyed society debutantes to thrill-seeking duchesses. The fact that these rakes are inevitably also habitues of […]
Read MoreThe Skin Crowd
/A sumptuous new book lays a vast roll call of frogs before the reader and opens a window onto the strange world of the world's most popular amphibian.
Read MoreBook Review: Into the Heart of Our World
/A new book offers a fascinating look at a complex and turbulent alien world - the one beneath our feet
Read MoreA Sensible Career Path in the Penny Press!
/Impossible for me to pass over Michael Dirda’s “Freelance” column from last week’s TLS, and likewise impossible for me not to respond. Dirda uses the little space this time to reflect on his long stint as an editor at the legendary Washington Post Book World, and in his typical fashion, he manages to build enormous […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Vatican Princess
/A new historical novel joins the ranks of those trying to rehabilitate the reputation of poor Lucrezia Borgia
Read MoreLibrary: An Unquiet History!
/Our book today is Library: An Unquiet History, a hymn of praise from 2003 to public libraries. It’s written by Matthew Battles, who worked at the Houghton Library (and lived in scenic Jamaica Plain!) at the time, and its touchstone throughout is Harvard’s mighty Widener Library, whose wonders he very effectively evokes: The library … […]
Read MoreWriters by Nature in the Penny Press!
/One of my newer magazine subscriptions is The Nature Conservancy, published by the deep-pocketed conservation group of the same name. The magazine is slightly oddly-sized, and it’s full of great nature photography, and the small handful of issues I’ve read regularly so far have impressed me with the breadth and sensitivity of their prose. The […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Boiling River
/A young explorer enters the Amazon in search of a legendary river that boils as it flows.
Read MoreMystery Monday: Jane and the Waterloo Map!
/Our book today is Jane and the Waterloo Map by Stephanie Barron, the latest in her long-running series of murder mysteries in which Jane Austen takes time out from being a novelist to try her hand at being a crime-solving sleuth. The series started back in 1996 with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor […]
Read MoreComics: The “Rebirth” of the Legion?
/Our book today is a brightly-colored celebration from 2008: Legion of Super-Heroes: 1050 Years of the Future, sub-titled: “Celebrating 50 Years of Everyone’s Favorite Super-Team of Tomorrow!” It reprints some of the best issues from the long run of the various incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes, DC Comics’ sprawling super-team of teenagers fighting interstellar […]
Read MoreAlive in the Wild!
/Our book today is Alive in the Wild, a 1970 compilation of short pieces of nature-writing by two dozen different hands, all of it introduced by Victor Calahane, a popular and busy mid-century mammalogist and science writer who was also the author of an absolutely wonderful book called Mammals of North America, which we’ll certainly […]
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