Book Reviews

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 [...]

Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine, set in rural West Texas in 1976, is a novel of relentless and brutally raw outrage, a fury-filled howl of women caught in a life and a [...]

  For students of westerns — or writing of any sort — the first forty pages of Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River are a masterful exhibition of how [...]

    Terry Pratchett — who died in 2015 at the age of 66 from Alzheimer’s — played for keeps. His 41 Discworld fantasy novels are the height of playfulness.  [...]

  There is the maddening mystery at the heart of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock — the disappearance of three teen girls and a teacher during a [...]