The title of Jake Johnson’s latest book — Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America — is more than a bit jarring. It’s that part about “Musicals and Mourning” [...]
Early on, Robert Garland, a professor emeritus of the classics at Colgate University, lets the reader know his scholarly intentions for What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour [...]
When Lew Archer first sees Miranda, the daughter of the missing millionaire Ralph Sampson, he has her pegged: I watched her over my salmon mayonnaise; a tall girl whose movements [...]
Elmore Leonard was a fan of human nature. He didn’t think in terms of us-and-them. We’re all us, each with flaws and moments of beauty. How else could he write [...]
The seven guys who make up the Animals had been through a lot in Christopher Moore’s earlier goofy novels set in San Francisco Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story and You [...]
Antony Maitland — an English barrister, a British spy during World War II, a thorn in the side of official police and an investigator with a knack for solving mysteries [...]
Kalypso has been told by Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, to permit Odysseus to return home after being held on her island of Ogygia — and in her bed — [...]
In preparing my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey, I made a detailed comparison of how it matched against Emily Wilson’s 2018 version and the 1967 rendering [...]
John Keegan opens The Face of Battle, his groundbreaking 1976 book on war, with an examination of generations of military historians and finds them wanting. For instance, he quotes at [...]
At any number of points in Saint Francis of Assisi, the book’s writers make the point that the thirteenth-century Italian mystic and friar has been many things to many people [...]
