Book Review: One Summer Day in Rome
/The lives of five visiting Americans are forever changed by their short but eventful stays in the Eternal City.
Read MoreBook Review: The Paris Spy
/The unsinkable Maggie Hope is on the case again in Susan Elia MacNeal's latest historical whodunit - this time set in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Read MoreBook Review: Midnight in the Pacific
/A key turning-point in the Battle of the Pacific gets a richly anecdotal new history.
Read MoreBook Review: Their Backs Against the Sea
/A ferocious and largely forgotten island battle marked a key point in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. A new book tells the story of the Battle of Saipan.
Read MoreThe Don and the Duchess!
/Our book today is Ancient History by M. I. Finley, and in addition to its own merits, it also had for me in this re-reading the charm of serendipity. I spend my life these days reading books and book reviews, so the book-driven serendipity to which I’d like to think I’ve always been observant now […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Half-Drowned King
/The first installment in a projected series about a wily Viking warrior, his leader - and the women in his life
Read MoreBook Review: The Seventh Function of Language
/Was the death of literary theorist Roland Barthes in 1980 the result of a simple traffic accident - or part of a deeper plot? Laurent Binet's new novel takes readers into the weird world of ginned-up semiology.
Read MoreBook Review: A Talent for Murder
/Andrew Wilson's new novel dramatizes the real-life ten-day disappearance of mystery novelist Agatha Christie nearly a century ago - and adds a touch of murder.
Read MoreBook Review: The Treaty of Versailles
/A new short treatment of the pivotal Treaty of Versailles by one of the greatest working historians of the First World War.
Read MoreBook Review: In the Highest Degree Tragic
/The doomed valor of the small, scrappy US Asiatic Fleet in the Pacific Theater, often overlooked in WWII histories, now gets an elaborate new chronicle.
Read MoreThe World in Her Image
/Bestselling author of Tudor historical fiction Philippa Gregory takes up the familiar tragedy of Lady Jane Grey - and her forgotten but equally compelling sisters - in her new book, as A Year with the Tudors II continues.
Read MoreIn the Penny Press: Geographica!
/I turned to the latest National Geographic, I freely admit, for some relief. My Facebook page and Twitter feed are full of misery and impending doom; the news feed on my iPad features daily – sometimes hourly – updates on the ways the President of the United States is disgracing the country; and the actual […]
Read MoreBook Review: Grace
/A young girl in 19th-century Ireland sets off on a dangerous odyssey with her even-younger brother in Paul Lynch's new novel.
Read MoreJane at 200 in the Penny Press!
/As I’ve mentioned – and as would surely come as no surprise in any case to any long-time Stevereads habitué – one of the periodicals to survive the Great Penny Press Purge of 2016 was the Times Literary Supplement, the mighty TLS. This would have been true in any case, the TLS being the world’s […]
Read MoreHelping the Cause in the Penny Press!
/In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, I let the subscriptions lapse on most of the periodicals I’d been reading up to that point. This wasn’t an easy decision, since I’d been subscribing to and attentively reading those dozen-or-so magazines and newspapers for decades – no longer reading them left what felt like […]
Read MoreBook Review: Bed-Stuy is Burning
/A debut novel tackles the volatile issues of gentrification and police brutality.
Read MoreBook Review: The Epiphany Machine
/A mysterious machine gives people tattoos that reveal deep oracular truths about themselves - and drives one young man to understand it all.
Read MoreBook Review: See What I Have Done
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The famous Lizzie Borden axe-murders are 125 years old in 2017, and a new debut novel explores the horrors from the viewpoints of several people directly involved.
Read MoreSummer Reading in the Penny Press!
/As I’ve noted before, it’s a curious anachronism, this whole idea of “summer reading.” At the back of it is a picture of a world in which hard-working people breathe a collective sigh of relief around Memorial Day, say a jovial good-bye to their office mates, pack the kids in the station wagon, and head […]
Read MoreBook Review: We Shall Not All Sleep
/The centuries-old rivalry between two families erupts in new tensions during one summer on a small island off the coast of Maine
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