Book Review: The Galapagos
/The beautiful Galapagos islands - home to finches, tortoises, and active magma - are the subject of a delightful new study
Read MoreBook Review: Jack the Ripper - The Forgotten Victims
/The first and most famous serial killer of the modern era killed five women in 1888 London - but did Jack the Ripper's crimes start there? And did they end there? The two greatest "Ripperologists" make the case for a killer's forgotten victims
Read MoreBody dysmorphia – pro and con – in the Penny Press!
/My favorite ironic, unintentional, sexist contrast of the month comes from the latest issue of GQ: quite by the random chance of advertising space, we get these two pictures side-by-side. On the one side, there’s a young woman who’s dementedly devoted to re-shaping her body into a living simulacrum of a Barbie doll, a self-mutilation GQ‘s […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Double-Crested Cormorant
/That sleek and elegant diving-bird, the double-crested cormorant, faces deep-seated prejudices - and disastrous legal measures - in North America, its ancestral home
Read MoreBook Review: Lord Dismiss Us
/A fantastic British boarding-school novel from another age gets a pretty reprint
Read MoreLeonardo Da Vinci!
/Our book today is Kenneth Clark’s slim 1939 monograph Leonardo Da Vinci, here presented in the very pretty 1989 Penguin reprint in an extra-sized paperback with loads of illustrations. The old Pelican mass market paperback of the book also had loads of illustrations, mind you, but for binding reasons they were all lumped together in […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: Dead People!
/Our book today is Scottish author Ewart Hutton’s Dead People, the follow-up to his debut Good People (the latter’s staid title was given a private edge by the book’s plot; this current book provides no such edge, so its title is the equivalent of Murder Mystery, alas), and its basic premise will be familiar to […]
Read MoreThe Demon-Haunted World!
/Our book today is Carl Sagan’s intensely personal and snarkily intelligent 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, a reasoned cry of defiance against what Sagan, approaching the end of his life, viewed as the gathering forces of intolerance and stupidity. Sagan spent his entire life waging a smiling, well-mannered, […]
Read MoreThe Return of the Soldier!
/Our book today is a steely, stunningly unsettling novella The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, best known today for her hefty works of nonfiction like The Meaning of Treason and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, works written after long periods of intense deliberation. This novella is a very different thing, as thin and […]
Read MoreCultured, erudite, and passionate, Louisa Catherine Adams had a long and fascinating life as wife to John Quincy Adams on the road to the presidency, and that life at long last has a superb biography
Read MoreBook Review: Wilfred Owen
/Robert Graves lived to be 90.
Read MoreBook Review: Roosevelt's Beast
/Deep in the Brazilian wilderness, Theodore Roosevelt and his son encounter a mysterious beast who kills without leaving any tracks
Read MoreBook Review: The Red Lily Crown
/A bookseller's daughter, a mad alchemist Medici prince, and a heroic Cornishman move the plot of Elizabeth Loupas's hugely enjoyable new historical novel
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Tale of the Heike!
/Some Penguin Classics feel practically inevitable. When the great translator Royall Tyler brought out his groundbreaking edition of the fourteenth-century Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike in 2012 from the Viking press, it became one of that category, and now it’s arrived: a beautiful big paperback Penguin Classic of the Heike edition, which so [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Queen Elizabeth's Daughter
/Idealistic young Mary Shelton finds love at the Tudor Court - but it's not the love her Queen has chosen for her
Read MoreThe Word Made Flesh
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