Book Reviews

There’s much that’s audacious about Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love. There’s the title, first of all.  It seems fitting for some sort of Romeo and Juliet story, with or without [...]

One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language is “Big Momma,” originally published in 1970. Back a half century [...]

Midway through Terry Pratchett’s 1997 novel Jingo, a conversation takes place between Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Corporal Delphine Angua von Überwald.  He is a 6’6” dwarf (by adoption) who’s the [...]

The shoot-out that ends Elmore Leonard’s 1977 novel The Hunted is just like those in the westerns he was still writing back in those days. Three heavily armed bad guys, [...]

After nearly 60 years, Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun by Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki remains the best book on the astonishingly vivid, highly original art of the medieval French master. [...]

As the title of his 2011 book indicates, Laurence Bergreen has a tight focus to his storytelling in Columbus: The Four Voyages. He provides very little about the first 41 [...]

It’s the mid-1970s, central London, and four people in their 60s, two men and two men, have been working together for two or three years in a small office doing [...]

In the dark night and under the icy water, Cordelia Gray, lungs bursting, is swimming for her life.  She knows that the sea is death if she cannot find the [...]

Haven Kimmel’s 2001 memoir A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana is a rollickingly funny entertainment about the childhood of a strange child in a strange family [...]

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 [...]