Patrick Reardon

In the opening scene of Robert van Gulik’s 1967 Judge Dee mystery Necklace and Calabash, the judge is on his way to a quick fishing vacation in Rivertown but has [...]

I’m not sure if Anne Kraatz’s 2006 Solstiss: The Seduction of Lace was a book commissioned by the Solstiss company. In 1989, Kraatz wrote the delightfully erudite Lace: History and [...]

There are two major characters in Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” One is the four-actor play Who’s [...]

A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the [...]

George Hardin Brown, the noted Stanford University medievalist and expert on Bede the Venerable, died at the age of 90 in 2021.  He had spent his entire adult life studying [...]

In The Bible and Poetry, published last year, Michael Edwards warned against the temptation to paraphrase the Bible. An English-born French poet and scholar, Edwards noted that much of the [...]

Florence at the end of the fifteenth century could be a dangerous place to have religious opinions. Girolamo Savonarola, an ascetic Dominican friar, won great praise and power by preaching [...]

It is noteworthy that readers of What Maisie Knew by Henry James don’t get a look at Maisie for most of the 1897 novel. All of the action is seen [...]

The hardcover edition of Mike Dash’s 2002 Batavia’s Graveyard has no subtitle.  But, to attract potential buyers, these words are at the top of the dustjacket: THE TRUE STORY OF [...]

The best books of 2019 Moby Dick by Herman Melville Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt The [...]