Book Reviews

I suspect that Charles Dickens was in a pretty foul mood when he wrote "Hard Times" in 1854. He draws stark differences between the "good" people and the "bad" people [...]

Philip Roth’s short novel Everyman, published in 2006 when the author was 73, is a bleak, blunt meditation on aging, the deterioration of the human body and the imminence of [...]

The Cave at Altamira, published in 1998 by Harry N. Abrams, is a celebration by scholars from several fields of the artistic wonders of a meandering cave near the small [...]

Historian Lyndal Roper published her biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet in 2016, but, even as it was going to press, she knew that there was more she had to [...]

Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of [...]

The pain that S. Yarberry suffers as a transgender person is strikingly described in their new book of jagged, anguished poetry A Boy in the City.  It is pain set [...]

In a writing career that spanned much of the 20th century, Howard Fast wrote some 76 novels, roughly one a year, starting in 1933. To avoid flooding his own market, [...]

Margery Allingham’s 1931 mystery Police at the Funeral is a truly excellent example of the genre — briskly told, peopled with interesting characters, investigated by a quirky non-detective and concluded [...]

The Horizon Book of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Lionel Casson is a fine book.  It’s just not what’s advertised. Or, at least, what I expected. Casson was a [...]

Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA [...]