Book Reviews

OK. This is more like it. The first book in Stieg Larsson's trilogy centering on Lisbeth Salander, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," was slow and often clumsily written. This [...]

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson is a curiously lumbering thriller. It starts slowly and ends slowly. In between, the novel has more than its share of [...]

There are many ways to approach "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," the majestic, mystical and often maddening book that James Agee and Walker Evans published in 1941. I'm going [...]

You'd never know from reading "Killing Lincoln" that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative political commentator. O'Reilly, the host of The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, doesn't use this [...]

Andre Norton's "No Night Without Stars" landed in bookstores in 1975. That was 23 years after her book "Star Man's Son," better known as "Daybreak — 2250 A.D.," appeared in [...]

As "Tinkers" opens, George is dying. Paul Harding makes this clear with his first sentence: "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died." By the end of [...]

Finishing "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned" by John A. Farrell, I was surprised to find myself underwhelmed by the book. No question, it's a good solid effort. Farrell has [...]

About midway through "The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution" by Mark Roseman, I got to wondering how writers like Roseman do it. I mean, writers who spend a good [...]

On Discworld, goblins live on — are beat up on, are exploited on, are starved on, die on — the edges. They stink. They steal chickens. They eat their young. [...]

Sometime, apparently in the mid-1890s, Daniel Burnham set up a meeting with Frank Lloyd Wright to present him with an extraordinary offer. At the time, Burnham was basking in acclaim [...]