Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our books today are a trio of delights from the good folks at Avon Books, and they come at just the right moment: despite the calendar showing a mid-March date, and despite Springlike temperatures only a few days ago, a monstrous blizzard is grinding its way toward Boston at this moment, threatening to bury budding […]
Read MoreA richly rewarding new book narrates the long and complicated history of the American quest for - and fight against - life, liberty, and the pursuit of sex.
Read MoreLong before the Great Recession shook the modern world to its financial foundations, there was the Great Depression, the subject of a gripping new history.
Read MoreOur book today is a towering classic of ecological literature: The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the book she wrote in 1947 in protest to a whole slate of proposed (and encroaching) drainage and construction projects designed to “improve” the vast waterlands of the Everglades. Douglas was a pint-sized force of nature, […]
Read MoreA taut, gripping new biography presents the life of the great warlord-monarch King Cnut
Read MoreA boisterous new biography re-examines the life and legacy of the enigmatic British Prime Minister and Labor leader Clement Attlee
Read MoreOur book today is Brazilian illustrator Vin Vogel’s follow-up to his 2015 classic The Thing About Yetis – joyful news to those of us who loved that book and its roly-poly head-tufted version of the famed Himalayan snow-man. The new book from Penguin’s Dial Books imprint is called BedTime for Yeti, and it opens by […]
Read MoreThe whole sweep of the Gulf of Mexico's nature and history is the subject of a fascinating and passionate new book.
Read MoreA ten-year anniversary is a milestone for any kind of monthly publication. The meshing of personalities, the jostling of priorities, and the unpredictable vagaries of the work-flow might be expected to hang together for a little while, a year maybe, and it might be hoped they could work for a little longer than that, perhaps […]
Read MoreIn the latest "Gray Man" novel, Mark Greaney's tough-as-nails title character is on the hunt in Southeast Asia for a vanished Chinese super-hacker.
Read MorePoor innocent Lady Jane Grey has been an ostentatious martyr to the Protestant cause for centuries; a new book tells her brief but familiar life story as continues.
Read MoreThe Soviet Union billed itself as a scientific utopia, and yet, as a tremendously readable new history illustrates, the awkward of marriage of state and science gave rise to a parade of absurdities.
Read MoreOur book today is a gutsy historical thriller from 2011 called Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr, the eighth novel featuring his scuffed and downtrodden detective – and reluctant SS member – Bernie Gunther, solving crimes and trying to keep his morals clean in WWII-era Germany. In this particular installment, he’s been summoned to Prague by […]
Read MoreYou've all seen the famous Rorschach inkblots; a fantastic new book tells the story not only of the inkblots but also of the odd, fascinating man behind them.
Read MoreOur book today is the paperback release of a history that’s near and dear to my daily routine: Devin Leonard’s utterly delightful Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service, brought out Grove Press last year to nerdishly enthusiastic reviews (including one from USA Today that included the simple, true line, […]
Read MoreThe author of the popular-science hit Sapiens returns with a book that looks not to humanity's distant past but rather to its immediate future.
Read MoreA warm, engaging memoir takes readers inside the post-presidency years of Ronald Reagan
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics breathe with the towering wisdom of the world’s great literary figures. And then there’s Voltaire. The voluminous writings of Francois-Marie Arouet have been a mother-quarry of pseudo-profundity for over two centuries, of course, so in that respect this slim new volume from Penguin – a new translation by Desmond Clarke of the […]
Read MoreA concise, hard-hitting new book outlines the long history of secrecy at the heart of US government
Read MoreA new history by the author of Hunting the President uncovers the long history of US presidential assassination attempts
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.