Book Review: Something in the Blood
/A big, generous new biography of the man who created Dracula
Read MoreFootnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores!
/Our book today is a lovely squat little thing from Clarkson Potter publishers: Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores, subtitled “True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers.” In it, writer and illustrator Bob Eckstein visits dozens of bookshops around the world – and hears about a few that no longer […]
Read MoreBook Review: Britain's War, 1937-1941: Into Battle
/A lively new history of the years England fought alone against the might of Nazi Germany
Read MoreBook Review: Vanity Fair's Writers on Writers
/The editors of Vanity Fair magazine delve into their century of writing to serve up dozens of their best writers writing about other writers.
Read MoreBook Review: Northmen
/A gripping new history tells the broader story of the Viking Era
Read MoreBook Review: Eyes on the Street
/A lively new biography tells the story of iconic urban visionary and outspoken cultural critic Jane Jacobs.
Read MoreSorry, Lady – This Beach is Private!
/Our book today is Sorry, Lady – This Beach is Private!, a 1963 collection of the cartoons and illustrations of James Stevenson, he of New Yorker fame. This volume collects dozens of Stevenson’s now-iconic little gems from his long heyday with the magazine throughout the 1950s and ’60s. They’re every bit as much of a […]
Read MoreNo Further Arrests Have Been Made
/The serial killer who stalked the streets of London in 1888 and became immortal under the name Jack the Ripper is the subject of a sumptuous new collection of fact and fiction.
Read MoreBook Review: Tamil
/A dense yet lyrical new book tells the long, intricate life story of the Tamil language and Tamil literature
Read MoreHypocritical Blather in the Penny Press!
/Like plenty of other people (perhaps particularly other beagle-fanciers), I loved Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Dish in most of its various incarnations over the years, and I read it eagerly even when, as was very often the case, I disagreed with the author. I was disappointed when he rather ostentatiously announced his retirement from blogging […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Playful Little Dog
/Penguin Random House continues its re-issue series of classic little children's books.
Read MoreBook Review: Lusitania - The Cultural History of a Catastrophe
/Just over a century ago, the luxury liner Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat with great loss of life, a disaster that, as a new book explains, re-shaped the world.
Read MoreThe beloved author of "The Egg and I" receives her first full-length biography
Read MoreWagging Tails!
/Our book today is a little treasure from deep, deep in the shadowy recesses of my personal library: a much-loved 1955 volume called Wagging Tails: An Album of Dogs, written by Marguerite Henry and drawn by Wesley Dennis. It’s an exuberantly friendly, colorful book full of friendly dogs, a book put out by Rand McNally […]
Read MoreBook Review: Cocteau - A Life
/The multi-faceted artist and director Jean Cocteau is the subject of a mammoth biography, newly translated into English
Read MoreBook Review: Selling Hitler
/A brilliant new study anatomizes the mechanisms of Nazi propaganda
Read MoreBook Review: Deepwater Horizon
/The explosion, fire, sinking, and oil spill of the Deepwater Horizon back in 2010 gets a definitive scholarly analysis.
Read MoreBook Review: If Venice Dies
/The tourist magnet of Venice faces an uncertain future on many fronts - but Salvatore Settis has many possible solutions in mind ...
Read MoreDürer’s Record of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries!
/Our book today is a little-known absolute gem that owes what very limited popular readership it’s ever had in America in the last eighty years to the stalwart old Dover reprint line as it once was – not its reprints of canonical classics, which have always been and continue to be glaringly ugly and editorially […]
Read MoreBook Review: Where Song Began
/The overflowing diversity of Australian bird life is the subject of Tim Low's captivating new book
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