Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is a little gem: the “Golden Regional Guide” A Guide to Everglades National Park and the Nearby Florida Keys (this one is the third printing, from 1962, when Warren Hamilton was the Superintendent of Everglades National Park), written by Herbert Zim and wonderfully illustrated throughout, not only with crisp (albeit tiny) photographs […]
Read MoreIn April of 1945, the destroyer USS Laffey was bombarded by wave after wave of kamikaze fighters - and yet survived. A gripping new book tells the story of a ship that refused to die
Read MoreIn the dystopian future of Jeffrey Rotter's fantastic novel, Copernican astronomy has been forgotten - but its secrets lie buried under what was once Florida
Read MoreAs obvious as obvious gets, and yet I chuckled aloud over my bai sach chrouk:
Read MoreIn time for the hundred-year anniversary of the Ottoman killing of over a million Armenians, a gripping new history tells the whole story of the tragedy
Read MoreThe main character of Adam Thirlwell's new novel has no redeeming qualities whatsoever - and he's sinfully easy to read about
Read MoreThe tense and frantic final months of the American Civil War forms the backdrop for Joseph Wheelan's lively new book
Read MoreOur book today is The Civilization of the Renaissance, the brilliant 1860 masterpiece by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, but it’s not just any edition: I recently found (at my beloved Brattle Bookshop, of course) a copy of the beautiful oversized edition put out by the Phaidon Press in 1939 for the English-language book market in […]
Read MorePresident Lincoln's mercurial Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gets a full-dress biography that would have gladdened the heart of anybody who ever wanted to hit him with a shovel
Read MoreOur book today is Stephen Kelley’s The Language of the Dead (the prepositional phrase isn’t explicitly necessary to get your book featured on Mystery Monday, but it obviously doesn’t hurt…), the first in a planned series of murder mysteries taking place in rural England during the Second World War, when food and resources are being […]
Read MoreThe latest big crossover event in DC Comics has now well and truly begun, although I’m predictably late getting around to writing about it here at Stevereads. It’s called “Convergence,” and part of the reason I’m late writing about it is that I’m still not entirely clear on what it IS. DC’s previous really big […]
Read MoreThe poet James Merrill at long last gets the lavish soup-to-nuts biography he's always deserved
Read MoreThe sprawling system of concentration camps established by the Nazis gets its first comprehensive history
Read MoreIn his new book, Peter Brown offers a provocative and fascinating new look at the evolution of the Christian idea that you can be helped in the next life by how much moolah you fork over in this one
Read MoreOur books today are three new romances hot off the presses, and they quite accidentally nagged at a small corner of my guilty conscience when it comes to my foremost guilty pleasure. In the past, veteran romance readers have accused me of disproportionately favoring historical romances over all other kinds, and although I initially bridled […]
Read MoreFrom the novelist, critic, and columnist Dale Peck comes a series of autobiographical essays and reflections about life during the height of the AIDS epidemic
Read MoreA fantastic, important new study traces the history of insanity in human history
Read MoreThe military collapse of France in 1940 has been a punch line and byword for decades, but a provocative new book argues that the traditional view is too simple
Read MoreOur book today is another slim little thing, James Winny’s 1970 entrant in Scribners’ old “Preface” series, A Preface to Donne, which at the time joined John Purkis’s A Preface to Wordsworth and Lois Potter’s excellent A Preface to Milton – and which was needed more thoroughly than either volume, as any even casual student […]
Read MoreIn 2011, a man detonated a bomb in Oslo and then shot dozens of people on a nearby island before surrendering to police. A vivid new book tells the whole story of the victims - and the killer
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.