Book Review: Brothers at Arms
/An invigorating new history looks at the American Revolution from a wide-angle international view
Read MoreBook Review: Crane Pond
/A smart and gripping new novel brings the Salem Witch mania to life.
Read MoreBook Review: The First Victory
/The tough and bitter East Africa campaign of 1941 receives a comprehensive new history.
Read MorePenguins on Parade: 120 Days of Sodom!
/Some Penguin Classics just never feel quite legitimate, no matter how hard they try, no matter how fervent their supporters are over the decades or centuries. This is how it will feel twenty years from now, when Kurt Vonnegut’s flyblown oeuvre is inducted into the line, and this is how it will feel thirty years […]
Read MoreTwo Books of Travel!
/Our books today – one old favorite and one I believe a new mention here at Stevereads – provide a warm-reminder reading experience that only gets warmer as the weather turns colder and the years go by: they’re both anthologies of travel-writing. The first, A Taste for Travel, was edited by John Julius Norwich in […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Vanquished
/A thought-provoking new history shines a spotlight on the long and brutal aftermath of the First World War
Read MoreA Pearl of Earls!
/Our books today are posies picked from the local Barnes & Noble, a colorful trio of Regency novels all occupying roughly the middle orbit in the solar system of the British peerage: all books about earls, that strangely accessible rank of nobility considerably above a viscount and just a bit below a marquess. Any time […]
Read MoreBook Review: Fifty English Steeples
/That familiar glory of medieval English architecture -the church spire - is the subject of a stunning new book.
Read MoreBook Review: Egyptomania
/A new book chronicles the world's enduring fascination with Ancient Egypt
Read MoreThe Lottery – The Graphic Novel!
/Our book today is a “graphic adaptation,” what once would have been known as an “illustrated classic,” of Shirley Jackson’s best-known little piece of work, “The Lottery.” It’s Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: A Graphic Adaptation, done with marvelous restrained mastery by Miles Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s grandson, who opens the production with a few remarks about […]
Read MoreBook Review: Scarlet Experiment
/Can birds - any species of bird, anywhere in the United States - survive their contact with humanity? A new book looks at the science and the sobering numbers.
Read MoreBook Review: Herbert Hoover
/Depression-era US President Herbert Hoover has always been easy to malign - a new biography argues that he's just as easy to underestimate
Read MoreHis Majesty, the Not Excessively Cowardly
/He's forever linked in history with his punning nickname, but a new biography shows there was more to Æthelred than being "Unready"
Read MoreTable Manners!
/Our book today is a slim little garlic tart: Table Manners: How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother, a 130-page guide to proper behavior written by Jeremiah Tower, whose author-note refers to him, non-ironically and without so much as a glance in the direction of the Maidu or Mojave, as “the forefather […]
Read MoreBook Review: Charlemagne
/The larger-than-life medieval Frankish king Charlemagne is the subject of a definitive single-volume biography now translated into English
Read MoreUnconditional!
/Our book today is Unconditional: Older Dogs, Deeper Love, a glorious result of photographer Jane Sobel Klonsky’s journeys around the United States, talking to people about their old dogs. This is a book that will bring a painful smile to the face of any dog owner, because its subject is the contradiction at the heart […]
Read MoreBook Review: Turner
/A sumptuous new biography of the man behind the Turner legend
Read MoreDude-Bro Reading in the Penny Press!
/As I’ve readily admitted in the past, the lad-mags for which I have something of a pronounced sweet-tooth aren’t really the places you go if you’re looking for literary coverage. It’s true that some of them pay their freelancers well, so in the rear pages of many an issue, you can often find writing that […]
Read MoreBook Review: Black Elk
/The Sioux medicine man and centerpiece of "Black Elk Speaks" is the subject of a comprehensive new biography
Read MoreThrough a Naturalist’s Eyes!
/Our book today is a kind of thing I’ve praised here at Stevereads many times in the past: regional natural history, in this case a pretty new volume from University Press of New England called Through a Naturalist’s Eyes: Exploring the Nature of New England, written by Michael Caduto and illustrated throughout by Adelaide Murphy […]
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