Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Summer’s last true efforts – it’s last firm grips of heat and humidity – have finally faltered here in Boston; the mid-afternoon skies are bright and warm as always, but the mornings now tell a different story: their shadows are longer, and there’s a touch of actual chill in them. Soon the season’s signature languor […]
Read MoreA gripping new book uses a tragedy in Utah to examine the growing menace of texting while driving
Read MoreWhen I opened the latest issue of my trusty Outside magazine, I thought the worst in bad-parenting outrage I’d have to face would be found in the letters column. Readers wrote in protesting the recklessness that writer Ted Conover had written about in an earlier issue, a monstrous and self-serving article called “This is How […]
Read MoreOn the one hand, I’ve trained myself over the last two years to hold virtually the entire run of DC Comics at arm’s length, since the comics company I’ve loved for so long is still in the throes of “The New 52,” a top-to-bottom revision of their superhero continuity, a revision almost entirely for the […]
Read MoreWhat really happened that night in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when four US citizens lost their lives when a large group of gunmen attacked the US compound? What were the forces that set the tragedy in motion, and could it have been prevented? A new book asks the hard questions
Read MoreThe events of September 11, 2012 at the American compound in Benghazi have proven extremely politically divisive, but Mitchell Zuckoff's new book strives to stay focused on the men doing the fighting and dying
Read MoreWhen a headstrong young woman jumps in a coach in order flee Mr. Wrong, she never guesses she's got a passenger in the back who might just be Mr. Right.
Read MoreWhat does a headstrong gambler do when she makes an all-or-nothing bet with an imperious lord - and loses?
Read MoreKing Henry VII's victory at Bosworth transferred the crown of England to the new Tudor dynasty - but it also left many Plantagenets hanging around making Henry VII anxious. His son Henry VIII shared that anxiety, and his gradually-increasing persecution of the last remaining Plantagenets is the heart of Philippa Gregory's new novel.
Read MoreHistorian S. C. Gwynne has written an immense - and immensely readable - biography of one of the most enduringly enigmatic figures of the American Civil War, Stonewall Jackson
Read MoreWe all know the names of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, but a terrifically engaging new book reminds us that the American Revolution's supporting cast was no less fascinating
Read MoreSpurred by a chance encounter with a wounded bird, Michele Raffin steadily grew her hobby into one of the world's most successful sanctuaries for rare and threatened birds in need of rehabilitation.
Read MoreKen Follett's enormous "Century Trilogy" comes to its conclusion against the backdrop of the Cold War, the civil rights struggle, and all the other trials of the 20th century
Read MoreThe First World War provided the dark inspiration for an entire generation of great writing, and a big new anthology assembles a stunning variety of that work, from the familiar to the obscure
Read MoreA compendium of uplifting stories of ordinary people making extraordinary efforts to find ways to help the poor and disadvantaged of the world
Read MoreA mild-mannered engineer goes out walking in Arizona and suddenly finds himself transported to a strange and violent alien world in M. C. Planck's fantastic latest novel
Read MoreA tightly-controlled kaleidoscopic debut novel from the lyricist for the Mountain Goats
Read More"It's not your fault." "What's not my fault?" "Nothing. Everything. I don't know."
Read MoreIn the face of a black wall of facts about environmental degradation and mass extinction, a scientist and teacher offers a much-needed note of hope
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics feel commercially motivated, and of course that speculation applies firmly to something like big, hefty Four Tragedies, collecting the Penguin texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. This edition has been reprinted many times over the last thirty years, for one very commercial reason: schools all over the world use it […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.