Book Reviews

It happened that, a week or so after the death of Neil Armstrong, I picked up this 1947 novel, and to say it’s quaint is an understatement. It’s sort of [...]

The final two sentences of “Millions” by Frank Cottrell Boyce are: Sometimes money can leave your hand and fall like water from a pipe onto the hot ground, and the [...]

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine, Steve Swanson, recommended Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians” as a classic in the field of biography — and a delightful read as well. I’ve [...]

I finished “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel a couple days ago, and I’m still not sure how to take it. […]

On the final page of “The Passage of Power,” Robert Caro sums up the 604 pages that have come before with a single word. He calls Lyndon Baines Johnson “heroic.” [...]

I found “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell to be quick and entertaining to read — and ultimately dissatisfying. Part of it has to do with Gladwell’s glibness. [...]

Midway through “The Giant O’Brien,” I was more than a little lost. I couldn’t quite figure out how to take Hilary Mantel’s tale of the 18th-century Irish giant Charles O’Brien [...]

Perhaps the best way to write about Paul Fussell’s 1975 masterpiece “The Great War and Modern Memory” would be to simply list willy-nilly some of the myriad insights, observations, facts, [...]

Now, let’s take these characters and make a novel! Ooops! I’m afraid I’m jumping the gun a bit here. I should tell you first what I’m talking about — “Imagined [...]

The North wasn’t the Promised Land. Or was it? The North didn’t have Jim Crow laws written into the books to keep African-Americans down. But it did have James Crow, [...]