The second half of Andre Norton’s 1969 Uncharted Stars is a fast-paced chase that is one of the best extended sequences in her 200+ books. This is the section that [...]

Some of Andre Norton’s fans consider The Zero Stone, published in 1968, to be one of her best books. I didn’t find it all that compelling although it is distinctive [...]

Shea Serrano’s Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated is a bag-of-potato-chips sort of book. No, that’s not quite right. It’s the book equivalent of seven [...]

In the Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus takes a trip to Hades where he encounters many of his former comrades from the Trojan War, including Achilles who asks him: “How could you [...]

Daniel Okrent’s newly published The Guarded Gate is about immigration.  But, much more, its subject is racism. Not black/white racism although that does rear its ugly head in Okrent’s rigorously [...]

As a world leader, Empress Dowager Cixi hasn’t had good press, nothing like, say, Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria. In terms of historical reputation, those women had their gender [...]

The best books of 2019 Moby Dick by Herman Melville Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt The [...]

Mostly Harmless — the 5th and sort-of final installment in the series of books by Douglas Adams that he started with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — is mostly [...]