Book Reviews

There is a vague, marshy border between poetry and prose. Marshy, as in rich with life, rich with the intermingling of earth and water and sunlight, crawling things, buzzing, flitting, [...]

Roger Ebert's "Life Itself" is a newspaperman's memoir, which is to say it's breezy, fact-filled and rather light on emotions. That makes sense, of course. For all his fame as [...]

In an often-reproduced photograph, Henrietta Lacks stands in a matching skirt and jacket, her hands at her hips, her hair complexly coiffed, a smile brightening her face. An attractive, lively [...]

"Miracle Ball" is a thin book, just 231 pages. And it could have been thinner. Even so, it's a sweet story, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress through the worlds of [...]

More than 40 years after it was first published, Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," his diary of his 1969 season with two major league teams, remains eminently readable and entertaining. And [...]

In 2005, the British publishing house of Canongate began producing a series of short novels based on myths from Western and non-Western civilizations. "The Penelopiad" by Margaret Atwood was among [...]

When my daughter saw me reading "The Odyssey," she made a face. Back in high school, I think it was, she had to read it, and hated it. Truth be [...]

Thomas Berger was born in 1924. He was 40 in 1964 when he published his best-known novel, "Little Big Man," chronicling the early life of Jack Crabb, a white who, [...]

A half century after its publication, Thomas Berger's novel "Little Big Man" is still a fine read, interesting and entertaining. But it doesn't pack the wallop it did back in [...]