Book Reviews

Over the past eight years, since April, 2016, I’ve been working my blissful way through Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels, starting with the first one, The Color of Magic — [...]

At the start of the Great Flood: And a little black spot begun to spread, Like a bottle of ink spilling over the sky; And the thunder rolled like a [...]

Kate Cooper’s Queens of a Fallen World is one of those wonderful books of detective work that tell the history of people forgotten by history. It’s a truism that, for [...]

William Blake (1757-1827), little known in his lifetime, is now considered one of the leading lights of Romantic Age painting, art and poetry.  He was also a visionary. And, by [...]

The narrator of Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat tells in the book’s opening pages of finding a “Tartar” thistle in a recently mown field — terribly tough, coarse and gaudily red [...]

At the end of 2023, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life was prominent on many best-of-the-year lists, but not on mine. This may be evidence of my wrong-headedness.  Still, I can’t [...]

(1) Twice in his preface to How Fiction Works, James Wood quotes the novelist Ford Madox Ford. In the first instance, Wood, citing Virginia Woolf, notes that the creation of [...]

More than 1,600 years ago, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, wrote his Confessions, and it’s been a book with staying power. Indeed, as measured by its friends and enemies, the book [...]

Augustine of Hippo, the hugely influential philosopher and theologian of the late 400s and early 500s, was, according to Garry Wills, “a tireless seeker, never satisfied.” In Saint Augustine, his [...]

There are several running gags that Elmore Leonard has woven through his 2004 novel Mr. Paradise, one of them having to do with the dismemberment of the body of one [...]