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★★★★☆ Ross King’s account of how Claude Monet (1840-1926) came to paint his famous water lilies is surpassed only by a visit, despite the hordes of tourists, to his home and gardens in Giverny,...
★★★★☆ Yellow Dog Democrat. Rabid Republican. True Believer. Each term conveys an assumption that one’s beliefs supersede any and all facts. There is no reasoning — no recognition that a viewpoint other than one’s...
★★★★☆ With a cascade of oddballs, theaters, dancers, confrontations, and concussions, iO Tillett Wright opens her tumultuous childhood to us. NYC in the 90s was a brutal place for the poor, and iO shows...
★★★★★ The clues were always there, hidden in plain sight. Biographer after biographer, essayist after essayist saw the information; some missed it completely. No one who saw the clues put them together until now....
★★★★☆ British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh tells “Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery” in this aptly-titled memoir. He provides a personal trip through his career by relating stories tied to various medical problems. Each...
★★★★☆ Celebrated in the American fiction canon for his precise, confident prose and stylized mid-century stillness, the late James Salter unquestionably deserves a book like the University of Virginia Press’s The Art of Fiction....
★★★☆☆ From Baltimore Punk clubs to the ruddy streets of pre-reunification East Berlin, All Tomorrow’s Parties follows Rob Spillman’s search for creative authenticity and inspiration in the music and literature around him. Having spent...
★★★★★ As a child, Hope Jahren spent hours in her father’s science laboratory, and from her mother she inherited a love of language. These earliest influences find an auspicious union in Lab Girl, Jahren’s...
★★★★☆ Timothy Egan’s The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero is a captivating biography of Thomas Francis Meagher (1823-1867) and his indispensable contributions to Irish-American identity. Meagher’s incredible life is...
