Book Reviews

Terry Pratchett, whose life was cut short in 2015 by Alzheimer’s disease, thought much about death during his 66 years. And, in his 41 hilarious, witty and silly Discworld fantasy [...]

Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott is a sparse, poetic examination of a profound and humane 20th century thinker who was deeply learned, richly insightful and, above all, [...]

The title of Elmore Leonard’s 1979 western Gunsights is a play on words although the reader doesn’t find that out until the plot twist on the novel’s final page. The [...]

Elmore Leonard writes amiable novels that tend to meander along until one of his dopey characters — all of his characters are, like humans, pretty dopey — breaks into violence [...]

Ken Krimstein’s 2018 graphic biography of Jewish-German-French-American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt is titled The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth. The cover with its three [...]

. A Mind to Murder, published in 1963, was the second mystery novel by P.D. James to center on British police detective Adam Dalgliesh, and it shows James as a [...]

      Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, military victor of the Civil War and a middling American president, contains much of value but is ultimately disappointing [...]

    The Baudelaire orphans find themselves yet again in an unfortunate event — in the clutches of Count Olaf. Midway through The Reptile Room, they are discussing the sad [...]

      Just before the first page of Jim Crace’s 1999 novel Being Dead, Joseph and Celice, zoologists married to each other, have been murdered in a clumsy, random [...]