There are travel books, and then there are travel books. One sort, such as Fodor’s, is jammed with facts about hotels, trains, battlefields, subways, mileage, restaurants, museums, exchange rates, airports, [...]
Jim Crace has said that his 2013 book Harvest will be his last novel. It’s not that he’s going to stop writing. He promises more books of other sorts but [...]
The five blind men and women lived in the attic room in a rundown tenement in New York City in the late 1800s, and Jacob A. Riis was there to [...]
There is much to say about Jacob Riis’s 1890 masterpiece How the Other Half Lives, but, first, let’s look at the faces in his book. In our selfie-social media age, [...]
Westerns move toward the mythic, but they end up simply formulaic unless they’re peopled by living, breathing characters. Initially, the mythic underpinning of western films and books was good guys [...]
A character in Elmore Leonard’s 2007 novel Up in Honey’s Room is wondering when he should draw a handgun, hidden in the cushions of a sofa, and shoot it out [...]
Nearly half a century ago, The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester was published to several decidedly negative reviews. The reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wasn’t sure, after going through [...]
Sometimes, when he was younger, Robert A. Heinlein would speculate in his stories and novels about the science of space travel, and that could get a bit wonky. Sometimes, when [...]
Mary Todd Lincoln was in her glory. It was March 28, 1861, and she had hosted her first state dinner at the White House as the nation’s First Lady. She [...]
Most of us find it uncomfortable to speak about lust. Philosopher Simon Blackburn is no exception, even though he lectured on the subject at the New York Public Library and [...]