Book Reviews

Science fiction can get complicated for authors who focus on the near-term future, as Robert A. Heinlein does in The Door into Summer. Consider this timeline: Heinlein writes the book [...]

It’s a night a couple weeks before Christmas, and Jody is at the shops around Union Square in downtown San Francisco where, writes Christopher Moore, droves of “package-laden shoppers trudged [...]

This priest was driving a bunch of us teenagers somewhere, and, as we headed down the Dan Ryan just past the turnoff for the Stevenson, he said, “Look out there [...]

Emily Neilson’s 2022 children’s book The Rainbow Parade is a joyful, colorful, exuberant celebration of diversity. It is based on her memories of going to the San Francisco Pride Parade [...]

Flee the Night in Anger, published in 1954 by Dan Keller, is a pleasant enough noir novel.  Its plot is overly complicated, but that’s par for the course with a [...]

At the start of Clair Huffaker’s 1958 Guns from Thunder Mountain, Larimer is riding with some of his new gold-mining partners and approaching a small log cabin on horseback when [...]

For eight months — September, 1940 to May, 1941 — the German Luftwaffe conducted a ferocious bombing campaign over London and other British cities and towns. An estimated 40,000 civilians [...]

Snuff is one of Terry Pratchett’s best Discworld novels.  Which is saying a lot since the 41 books in the series have sold more than 80 million copies in 37 [...]

I came to realize, as I read Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun, that I have an image of William Shakespeare that is somewhat larger than life.  Make [...]

Perhaps the most important sentence in Elena Ferrante’s 2011 novel My Brilliant Friend comes when fifteen-year-old Elena Greco is spending her summer on the island of Ischia across from her [...]