Book Reviews

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 [...]

A friend of mine is very big on stories having a beginning, a middle and an end. The 15 stories in The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff don’t fit [...]