Book Reviews

When she and her husband Joseph were murdered on an isolated stretch of beach, Celice's body fell onto the sand, upending a dune beetle and trapping him in the folds [...]

Reading the last line of Alan Bennett's "The Uncommon Reader," I laughed out loud. I can't guarantee you will, but I suspect you will find this short 2007 novel funny [...]

Okay, so I'm a 10-year-old boy at heart. I found the 2010 movie "How to Train Your Dragon," starring Jay Baruchel as the hapless Hiccup, endlessly droll, inventive, touching and [...]

When Reay Tannahill began working on the book that became "Food in History," she was entering virgin territory. No one before her had attempted to chronicle the relationship of humans [...]

I thoroughly enjoyed "Memory Mambo" when I read it in early 1997, shortly after it was published. Fifteen years later, I savored it even more. Achy Obejas is a friend, [...]

Let's talk about book titles, and book covers, and book marketing. For all intents and purposes, S.C. Gwynne's 2010 book "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the RISE [...]

Lisbeth Salander is fascinating. Thin, short and socially stunted, she is a victim of abuse, domestic and institutional. Yet, she is even more a survivor — one with extraordinary skills [...]

OK. This is more like it. The first book in Stieg Larsson's trilogy centering on Lisbeth Salander, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," was slow and often clumsily written. This [...]

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson is a curiously lumbering thriller. It starts slowly and ends slowly. In between, the novel has more than its share of [...]

There are many ways to approach "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," the majestic, mystical and often maddening book that James Agee and Walker Evans published in 1941. I'm going [...]