Book Reviews

On the surface, Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is about two highly controversial verses that may or may not have been in Qur'an. Certainly, that’s what got Rushdie [...]

The scribbled telegram text, sent by messenger from the top of Mount Everest, was bleak — but also a bit odd. Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop [...]

Here is the sad reality at the center of Leo Steinberg’s 2001 book Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper: Of Leonardo’s Last Supper we have only an after-image….[O]f the original surface — [...]

  David R. Slavitt’s 2001 The Book of Lamentations: A Meditation and Translation is a post-Holocaust reading of the short biblical work inconsolably grieving the destruction of the Temple in [...]

In 1972, when P.D. James published An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she’d been a novelist for just a decade. Her first four books were centered on Adam Dalgleish, a [...]

Saint Teresa of Avila was a woman of 16th century Spain, a nun mystic experienced in the bliss and pain of religious ecstasy but also nun living under the power [...]

The girl walks down to the lake to the spot where she and her father fish.  A goose and gander and five goslings are there, making a home for the [...]

The story of French noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval has been told and retold over the past 150 years in popular entertainment — several historical novels, poems, a [...]

Eliot Pattison’s The King's Beast: A Mystery of the American Revolution is a potboiler stew of brutality, detective work, derring-do, tribal gods, forest lore, London lore, an evil Earl, torture, [...]