Book Review: The President's Book of Secrets
/A fascinating new book presents readers with a bounty of stories surrounding the daily intelligence-services briefing given to US Presidents
Read MoreBook Review: History and Presence
/An invigorating new study of the real presence of the divine in the mundane workings of organized religion
Read MoreBook Review: Waiting for the Past
/The latest volume from deceptively erudite Australian poet Les Murray
Read MoreBook Review: Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
/America's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay gets an elegant new Selected Poems volume
Read MoreThe Lady with the Borzoi!
/Our book today is The Lady with the Borzoi, a biographical tribute to Blanche Knopf that somehow feels both surprising and long overdue. The book, written with grace and a cheery volubility by Laura Claridge, is the story of Blanche Knopf, the so-called “soul” of the publishing house she created a century ago with her […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Empire That Would Not Die
/Abandoned by the West and battered by the Islamic caliphate, the eastern Roman Empire shrank and withdrew but did not fall - a new history asks why
Read MoreClassical Literature!
/Our book today is Classical Literature: An Epic Journey from Homer to Virgil and Beyond by emeritus Oxford don Richard Jenkyns. The book is an alarmingly thin perambulation through the whole of the classics from the Homeric era through the Augustan Age and a little bit beyond, a hurried tour that’s saved from being a […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Fever of 1721
/When smallpox struck the city of Boston in 1721, battle lines were drawn over how to deal with it - and strange alliances formed
Read MoreThe Medici!
/Our book today is the latest from the prolific Paul Strathern: The Medici, subtitled somewhat predictably “Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance.” And the subtitle is hardly the only thing in the book that’s predictable; after all, G. F. Young did this kind of tour d’horizon over a century ago, laying out the […]
Read MoreBook Review: Tales from the Long Twelfth Century
/At the center of a lively, personality-driven new book about the twelfth century is the contentious family of King Henry II
Read MoreThe Edge of Empire!
/Our book today is The Edge of Empire: A Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall, an utterly winning and somewhat old-fashioned work by Bronwen Riley in which she imagines a sprawling travel itinerary of Antonine Rome through a narrative device that was once familiar in popular histories of ancient Rome, […]
Read MoreBook Review: Thoreau's Wildflowers
/A lovely new volume offers a selection of Henry David Thoreau's heartfelt writings about flowers
Read MoreJesus Before the Gospels!
/Our book today is the latest from Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, bestselling author of such books as Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. His new book is called Jesus Before the Gospels and has the opus-length subtitle, How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. As the book’s title […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Whole Harmonium
/A sympathetic new biography of the poet Wallace Stevens
Read MoreOn Being Human!
/Our book today is the new one from Jerome Kagan, the emeritus professor of psychology at Harvard University. The book is On Being Human: Why Mind Matters (a pleasingly sturdy hardcover from Yale University Press), consisting of a series of connected meditations on topics ranging from the power of societal norms to the suggestive effects […]
Read MoreBook Review: Dante - The Story of His Life
/A thorough new biography explores the life of the great Florentine poet in detail
Read MoreBetween a Rock and Bleeding Mouth-Cancer in the Penny Press!
/As I’ve mentioned before here at Stevereads, it’s always a pleasure for me to see a glossy square-bound lad-mag divert from quick-ab workouts and $35,000 wristwatches to talk about some of the less venal elements of what goes into making a well-rounded person. The most vulnerable of those elements is of course the gentle art […]
Read MoreThe Mark of the Horse Lord!
/Our book today is a rattling good yarn from an author we’ve met before here at Stevereads: Rosemary Sutcliff, this time her 1965 novel The Mark of the Horse Lord, which follows the hard life and harrowing adventures of young Phaedrus, a slave in northern Britain in the first century who’s a gladiator when the […]
Read MoreDancing Fish and Amonites!
/Our book today is one of my many re-reads: Penelope Lively’s 2013 memoir Dancing Fish and Amonites, her elegant and intelligent meditation – partly about her life and upbringing but mainly about the story of her life as she observes it in her own memories: “The memory that we live with – the form of […]
Read MoreBook Review: Eruption
/Nearly 40 years ago, Washington State's Mount St. Helens volcano erupted, killing 57 people and spewing hundreds of tons of molten ash into the atmosphere. A gripping new book tells the story.
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