Book Reviews

"Miracle Ball" is a thin book, just 231 pages. And it could have been thinner. Even so, it's a sweet story, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress through the worlds of [...]

More than 40 years after it was first published, Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," his diary of his 1969 season with two major league teams, remains eminently readable and entertaining. And [...]

In 2005, the British publishing house of Canongate began producing a series of short novels based on myths from Western and non-Western civilizations. "The Penelopiad" by Margaret Atwood was among [...]

When my daughter saw me reading "The Odyssey," she made a face. Back in high school, I think it was, she had to read it, and hated it. Truth be [...]

Thomas Berger was born in 1924. He was 40 in 1964 when he published his best-known novel, "Little Big Man," chronicling the early life of Jack Crabb, a white who, [...]

A half century after its publication, Thomas Berger's novel "Little Big Man" is still a fine read, interesting and entertaining. But it doesn't pack the wallop it did back in [...]

There is so much that is wonderful — and scary — in Richard Rhodes' 1986 history of the creation of nuclear weapons, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." For me, [...]

There is much in this book that's infuriating. I'm not referring to the myriad ways in which the people of the United States (and earlier in the American colonies) have [...]

If Emily Dickinson had had a sense of humor, she might have written "A Girl Named Zippy." And if she'd been born in 1965 in Indiana. That's when and where [...]