Book Reviews

Maybe it was funnier and more interesting back in 1986 — Paradise, I mean, the thin, wispy novel by Donald Barthelme. Or maybe Barthelme just had a harder time sustaining [...]

If Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey were movies, they’d come with a content warning: Graphic Violence. After all, the one is all about the bloody and gruesome [...]

Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative book [...]

Frederick Busch’s 1990 novel Harry and Catherine is a love story about fear. Harry Miller and Catherine Hollander had been together in Vermont when young — Harry, a New York [...]

It is astonishing to turn to pages 102-103 in Mario Ruspoli’s The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs and find the curving wall and mural in the Hall of Bulls, [...]

Major-General James Wolfe, commander of the English forces at the Plains of Abraham on the morning of September 13, 1759, had already been shot twice in the battle against the [...]

Modern folklore says that the Inuits (Eskimos) have more than fifty words for snow and ice, but, apparently, the fact is there are only about half that many. In his [...]

There’s a tendency to think of great painters such as Michelangelo and Rembrandt as geniuses who worked alone.  Of course, they’d have a lot of support staff, if only to [...]

If you are grieving or have grieved in the past, you know that people want to help, but, often, they just don’t know how. In Grieving: A Spiritual Process for [...]

Edna Ferber’s The Girls, a novel about three independent-minded South Side women yearning for vibrant lives, was originally published more than a century ago, but it’s written with such verve [...]