Perhaps the most important sentence in Elena Ferrante’s 2011 novel My Brilliant Friend comes when fifteen-year-old Elena Greco is spending her summer on the island of Ischia across from her [...]

The first 70 or 80 pages of the novel Djibouti moved so slowly that I began to wonder if, after more than half a century of great writing, Elmore Leonard [...]

In 1944, at the age of 13, Brooke Randel’s grandmother Golda Indig was with her older sister in the German death camp of Auschwitz.  They had been separated from the [...]

John, the friend who recommended Peter Sarris’s 2023 Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint, had one caveat about the book’s subtitle: “He was no saint.” It’s funny how a comment like that [...]

Generally, I don’t read introductions before starting a novel.  I want to experience the book fresh on its own terms and on my own terms. I don’t want some other [...]

The American nuclear-powered submarine USS Dolphin and her crew have an awful lot of bad luck on a trip under the ice cap to save the survivors of a devastating [...]

In the profane manner of professional athletes, Bobby Hunter had this summary of Abe Saperstein, the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters and, for more than three decades, the team’s owner [...]