Book Review: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia
September 23, 2025David Abulafia’s new book about the Mediterranean Sea, The Great Sea, has everything a major work...
Book Review: Blue Nights by Joan Didion
September 23, 2025We learn that Quintana Roo was adopted, a beautiful precocious girl with hair “bleached by the...
Book Review: Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream and Five Acres in Maine by Lou Ureneck
September 22, 2025In September 2007, Lou Ureneck, a 56-year-old journalism professor at Boston University, was hospitalized for atrial...
Book Review: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow
September 21, 2025So if she wasn’t pleasant, what was Pauline Kael? She was earthy; she was tough; she...
Book Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
September 19, 2025In this profound and spirited work, Pinker champions the civilizing process that, according to his detailed...
Book Review: Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris
September 12, 2025Woolf spent much of her life trying to free herself from the grasp of the past,...
Book Review: Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer
September 8, 2025Neumeyer responded with scholarly esprit, but he was hard put to equal his partner’s digressions. The...
Book Review: Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles
September 3, 2025Carthage, however, was not merely conquered by Rome. As the title of Miles' book asserts, Carthage...
Book Review: René Blum and the Ballets Russes by Judith Chazin-Bennahum
August 23, 2025All of Blum’s many accomplishments were bracketed between the anti-Semitic turmoil of the Dreyfus Affair that...
Book Review: Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
August 20, 2025Except for a (thankfully) brief, unscientific use of Google metrics, Orr beautifully shares instances of why...




