A Red Like No Other is several books in one, and that may be too many for some readers and, at the same time, not enough. I found it fascinating. [...]
In 1776, a French spy went to Oaxaca in Spanish-held Mexico. He was there to steal a treasure — a tiny bug called cochineal. The female of this insect species [...]
A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield won wide praise from reviewers when it was published in 2005. Without question, [...]
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is a particularly scary book to read in the fall of 2015 when businessman Donald Trump and an array of other candidates for the [...]
What would it be like to have 653 red and white American quilts assembled and displayed together in the same place? That unusual question was at the heart of the [...]
I found A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published in 2004, endlessly fascinating — and endlessly irritating. What Ekirch set out to do in this book [...]
David R. Weiss tells a sweet story about a father and a young daughter in When God Was a Little Girl, playfully and joyfully illustrated by Joan Hernandez Lindeman. Yet, [...]
Granny Weatherwax returned home from her work as a witch, the most powerful witch on the Discworld. She took a very short nap — “Granny Weatherwax allowed herself not forty [...]
The Catholic Church is big on books about the Lives of the Saints. There’s even a term for it: “hagiography.” Nicola Griffith’s 2013 novel Hild is the first of a [...]
In Sexing the Cheery, her elliptical 1989 novel — equal parts poetry and philosophy — Jeanette Winterson tells of a handful of characters in the complex setting of time and [...]
