Book review: “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth
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 [...]
Book review: “Red & White Quilts: Infinite Variety” by Elizabeth V. Warren with Maggi Gordon
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 [...]
Book review: “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” by A. Roger Ekirch
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 [...]
Book review: “When God Was a Little Girl” by David R. Weiss, illustrated by Joan Hernandez Lindeman
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, [...]
Book review: “The Shepherd’s Crown” by Terry Pratchett
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 [...]
Book review: “Hild” by Nicola Griffith
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 [...]
Book review: “Sexing the Cherry” by Jeanette Winterson.
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 [...]
Book review: “Last Ragged Breath” by Julia Keller
The tone of Last Ragged Breath is set on the book’s first pages when Goldie, a six-year-old shepherd-retriever mix, is running joyously along the bank of Old Man’s Creek after [...]
Book review: “The Light Fantastic” by Terry Pratchett
In Terry Pratchett’s second Discworld novel The Light Fantastic, a mob of Ankh-Morpork citizens has marched through the streets to the gates of the Unseen University to demand that the [...]
Book review: “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis
Some books are like a lot of magazine articles and newspaper stories. They are so rooted in a present moment that, in the long run, they don’t stand up. Circumstances [...]