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★★★★★ The final installment in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Revolutionary War trilogy may be the strongest yet. First, Bunker Hill covered the opening salvoes of what came to be a protracted war of attrition. Then Valiant Ambition explored the...
★★★★☆ Tibet, despite its difficulties, is producing extraordinary writers. The groundbreaking Old Demons, New Deities stands as the first English-language anthology of contemporary Tibetan literature. Edited and introduced by Tenzin Dickie, these twenty-one stories...
★★★★☆ ‘Tis a grand day when Irish writer Tana French releases a new novel into the world! The Witch Elm is her first standalone story after five brilliant Dublin Murder Squad mysteries. She just...
★★★★☆ 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...
