We help readers find great books.
★★★★☆ A book, television show, or movie set somewhere in Scandinavia leads the reader or viewer to expect dark, foreboding landscapes and ominous, threatening events. Susanne Jansson’s sparkling debut novel The Forbidden Place fulfills...
★★★☆☆ Poetry exists in the ears of the beholder. Sound—listened to out loud or internally—grabs one first. As the words wrap into our consciousness, we begin to feel their depth and value. We move...
★★★★☆ In Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, David Frye has written an encompassing and enlightening review of walls through the centuries, ranging from 2000 B.C. to the present. A “Selected Timeline”...
★★★★☆ What is the cost of living? How do our choices affect us? What compromises must we make in order to have a fulfilling life? By what metrics do we measure the days of...
★★★★☆ Is there anything more awe-inspiring than watching a whale, the largest creature on earth, gliding through the ocean and breaching, slapping its flukes onto the water? We travel and pay good money to...
★★★☆☆ Benjamin Black’s “historical fantasy…(shows that) real life at the court of Rudolf II was entirely phantasmagorical.” Wolf on a String is a brooding historical noir that imagines the sordid underbelly of Rudolf’s court...
★★☆☆☆ The promise of Robert Wright’s title is not fulfilled in this personal narrative of his journey toward enlightenment and a deeper understanding of Buddhism. The Appendix of Why Buddhism Is True finally reveals...
★★★★☆ Mark Kurlansky writes that milk is a “10,000-year-old controversy. When you think about it, it was a pretty weird thing to begin with, the idea that we could replace mothers with secretions from...
★★★★☆ Half a lifetime ago my graduate minor was anthropology with a smattering of archaeology. It was so long ago that none of the giants whose works I read and studied are even mentioned...
