Built by Roma Agrawal
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The wind blows, the ground shakes, and your home remains standing whether it is stick-built or a skyscraper of steel and concrete. There are specific reasons why this is...
Author: John Formy-Duval
The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Reminders of the first lines of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House underpin the opening of Margery Allingham’s small and wonderful 1929 mystery novel The Crime at Black Dudley: “The view...
The Triumph of Christianity by Bart D. Ehrman
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart D. Ehrman attempts to answer the crucial question of how Christianity succeeded when other comparably small religious sects lost traction or disappeared completely....
The Wine Lover’s Daughter by Anne Fadiman
★★★☆☆ The essayist, critic, and radio mainstay Clifton Fadiman is an entirely fitting subject for a book, but even more appropriate is to have that book be a brilliant love letter from his daughter....
Ethics: The Art of Character by Gregory R. Beabout
★★★☆☆ If you only vaguely remember Plato’s cave analogy or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, or you are confused as to what passes for ethical behavior in our current fraught times, then Gregory R. Beabout’s succinct...
London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford
★★★★☆ “The Elizabethan and Jacobean mind was brilliantly elastic.” “Thinking a project achievable somehow made it so.” In London’s Triumph, Stephen Alford succinctly captures the expanding worldview of an insular nation that grew from...
Best Books of 2017: John’s Picks
Every list of “Best Books” is purely subjective, hostage to one’s personal tastes and to the seldom-acknowledged detail that the evaluator is never able to read all the books available in a given year....
Sleep no More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James
★★★★☆ Murder in multiple guises invades the six intimate stories of death in P.D. James’ Sleep No More, with emphasis not on the victims but the perpetrators and how they came to commit this ultimate...
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Leonardo da Vinci may be the best biography of the year. It has certainly received the most hype, and in this instance it rises to the level of approbation...
