I picked up Bill Petrocelli’s Through the Bookstore Window in the midst of reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.  I wasn’t looking for a break, but I had already [...]

    Steven Ujifusa’s Barons of the Sea ends with a quote from Captain Charlie Porter Low, a man who had run away to sea and spent his life as [...]

In 1997, near the end of the long-running television comedy Seinfeld, Larry Charles said that, when he and the other writers would sit down to produce a script, it was [...]

    On the first page of Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Iver Kaufman makes it clear that he’s not writing about Shakespeare the believer, Shakespeare the adherent to this or [...]

    Twice, King Lear says, “Nothing will come from nothing.”  It is one of the most striking of the many striking lines in William Shakespeare’s masterpiece King Lear. Harold [...]

  Donald Trump looms over Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics like one of the Bard’s ghosts, unavoidable, untouched, a dark dream of dread too fearsome to face. In his [...]

    There is much about Joseph Campbell’s 1948 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that I find problematic. Campbell displays amazing erudition in this book and a vast [...]

  After 768 pages of text and more than 350,000 words, the reader of Robert A. Caro’s The Path to Power might easily come away wondering: “Well, who was Lyndon [...]

  The high point of Terry Pratchett’s eighth Discworld novel Guards! Guards!, published in 1989, comes when Carrot Ironfoundersson, the six-foot-six-inch dwarf and probationary member of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, arrests [...]