Book Reviews

  In 2005, Penguin Books published a new translation of Bardo Todol, the collection Buddhist texts that, in the West, has been known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead [...]

    The 21 poems in John A. Griffin’s chapbook Absences: A Sequence appear very orderly. Each is 20 lines long.  Within each poem, the number of syllables per line [...]

One of the seven short essays in Gustaf Sobin’s final book Aura, published in 2009, is about the deep, unremitting darkness of medieval times. And about light, then and now. We [...]

I’ve never been to the Burren in western Ireland or, for that matter, to Ireland at all.  But my curiosity was piqued when I heard about Gordon D’Arcy’s 2006 book [...]

The dainty Persian bells would jingle in the middle of the night when Alfred Busi’s wife Alicia would go downstairs to the larder for a snack. “What could it matter [...]

Well, when you get down to it, isn’t life a trick? You’re born and spend your whole existence on Earth trying to figure out what it all means. And then [...]

    Jack Finney’s 1970 time-travel novel Time and Again is a lot of things, including a cult favorite. It’s a science fiction novel inasmuch as it deals with time [...]

Abraham Lincoln by Adam I.P. Smith was published in 2014 by the Britain-based History Press as part of its Pocket Giants series of very short — 100 or so pages [...]

.There is no point to the study of history if each event, each action, each decision is seen in some mechanistic manner — as if what happened had to happen. [...]

People get obsessed.  They get obsessed with growing orchids.  With the fortunes of the Los Angeles Lakers or the Cincinnati Reds or the Cleveland Browns.  With the stock market. With [...]