Book Reviews

Jane Ward’s In the Aftermath is an earnest, even affecting examination of the strong waves of guilt, sadness and anger among family and friends that follow the suicide of a [...]

Detective Cotton Hawes gets off on the wrong foot when he’s transferred from the cushy, affluent 30th precinct to the rough and tumble 87th. He knocks on a door and [...]

In the final pages, the Discworld does not end, and everything comes down to a copper doing his job and to what is described as “the peculiar mathematics of heroism.” [...]

In 1937, Agatha Christie published Death on the Nile in which her detective Hercule Poirot has to solve a whole bunch of puzzling murders while on a river steamer cruise. [...]

Madam Frout, headmistress of the Frout Academy and pioneer of the Frout Method of Learning Through Fun, is pretty dopey in an over-educated way.  As Terry Pratchett explains in his [...]

In a real way, Jennifer T. Roberts’ Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction is a 112-page blurb for the great Greek historian’s Histories. Written around 430 BC, The Histories — which, [...]

Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, such as Ma Rainey, a blues mentor, who got into trouble one evening with [...]

For more than 2,400 years, The Histories by Herodotus has been a foundation block of Western civilization, the first work of history in Western literature. Written in classical Greek and [...]

A single paragraph about two-thirds of the way through the book exemplifies the strength and clarity of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of [...]

Technically, Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James is a pastiche inasmuch as it’s a literary work, written in the style of another author, in this case, Jane Austen, that [...]