Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Last week’s comics haul from my beloved Comicopia here in Boston yielded quite a bit of good stuff (including the third issue of Captain America: White and the first issue of Sam Wilson: Captain America) and one item that was as confusing as it was heart-tugging for me: the first issue of what looks to […]
Read MoreAn ambitious new work of history charts the rise to victory of Nazi Germany - and deflates a few treasured myths along the way
Read MoreAs Hamlet would say, look here upon this picture and on this: two young men, both in their thirties, both white, both good-looking in generic kinds of ways, both intelligent, both multi-millionaires, both objects of interviews in a recent issue of New York magazine – and both, on the surface of those interviews, raging douchebags […]
Read MoreA new anthology looks at the rich, creepy atmosphere that gave rise to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe - and then was dominated by him as by no other author
Read MoreThe great Persian King Xerxes gets a wonderfully sharp and detailed biography for Western readers
Read MoreOur books today are the neatest little things you’ll see in the rest of 2015’s book-year: a set of Modern Classics from Picador Press, done up in a neat bow! In honor of their own 20th anniversary, Picador has crafted this set of Modern Classics, sturdy little hardcovers beautifully designed by Steven Seighman as compact […]
Read MoreWhile a young Winston Churchill was making history during the waning years of the Victorian Empire, he was also reporting on himself making history during the waning years of the Victorian Empire. A new book tells the old story.
Read MoreOn the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, a spirited new biography looks at King John
Read MoreA new book looks at one tumultuous year in the life of William Shakespeare
Read MoreIn the latest of David Weber's "Safehold" novels, Industrial-Age technology is coming to a quasi-Renaissance world, ready or not
Read MoreAn effective debut novel looks at the story of famous Cleopatra's much less-famous sisters
Read MoreThe first volume of Michael Broers' new Napoleon biography follows its famous subject from obscure Corsican boyhood to the stage of world-wide fame.
Read MoreAmong the spread of new comics on the wall at Comicopia this week were two first issues: Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, and of course I bought them both. I liked the pairing in this case; back when I first started reading the adventures of these two characters, neither one had his own book, so seeing […]
Read MoreA grand and jauntily mythological new volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winning Yusef Komunyakaa
Read MoreOur book today is a classic of popular natural history from 1975, Among the Elephants by Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, who are now old and wrinkled but who were once lithe and limber back forty years ago when they first set out to study the elephant herds in the vicinity of Lake Manyara in the […]
Read MoreA big new volume commemorates a century of "Best American Short Stories," which began - as with all worthy things - in Boston a long time ago
Read MoreThe author of such brilliant novels as "Year of Wonders" and "March" takes on the Biblical story of King David
Read MoreOur book today, a winner of a thing by Thomas Kohnstamm from 2008, asks the always-pertinent question, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? – and like almost all books with questions in the title, the answer is obvious. The book follows Kohnstamm on his transformation from an ordinary white-collar worker – with a steady girlfriend, […]
Read MoreThe odd couple military police sergeants Sueno and Bascom return in Martin Limon's gripping new mystery set in 1970s Korea
Read MoreThis week’s comics presented a stark juxtaposition between old and new, tradition and innovation, and as much as I tend to hate the new and the innovative when it comes to superhero comics, my reactions this time around were tempered by quality, which is always a nice way to have your reactions tempered. The ‘tradition’ […]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.