The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Venice is made up of four essays that German polymath Georg Simmel wrote between 1898 and 1907, translated by Will Stone and published [...]
Thomas Berger’s 1983 novel The Feud is a screwball comedy which features two killings, a natural death after a fistfight, a botched suicide, a car bomb and a hardware store [...]
Timothy Taylor raises many questions in his 2002 book The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death, and, like any good anthropologist, he doesn’t provide clear-cut answers. How could he? The [...]
Early on in Cat Chaser, I realized that the 1982 novel just didn’t have Elmore Leonard’s usual pizzazz and punch. For one thing, George Moran, a rundown motel owner-operator [...]
When Mary Curtin, a Boston nanny in the late 1950s, gets the telegram MOTHER DYING, she thinks, I’d be too late. She’ll never admit that she doesn’t know what she’d [...]
I ordered Ed Hulse’s The Art of Pulp Fiction: An Illustrated History of Vintage Paperbacks and started reading it soon after it arrived. The text is a lively discussion of [...]
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. [...]
