Helping readers find great books.
★★★★☆ Shakespeare in Swahililand is a valuable addition to one’s Shakespeare collection, for it reveals in a delightful and insightful manner the global reach of Shakespeare’s work. Like the worlds Shakespeare created, “Swahililand” does...
★★★★★ Let’s consider floating a transitional state, stuck between flying and falling. It’s the top of an arc, a beautiful moment of momentary weightlessness before crashing back to earth. Mathematically speaking, there’s a brief...
★★★★☆ Mary Higgins Clark has been writing thrilling mysteries for decades. The Sleeping Beauty Killer, the fourth book about TV producer Laurie Moran, is her third collaboration with Alafair Burke. The Sleeping Beauty Killer finds...
★★☆☆☆ Ha Jin’s The Boat Rocker is a scathing satire about Chinese-American patriotism and intellectual integrity. When young Chinese immigrant Yan Haili’s 9/11-exploiting novel Love and Death in September gets a publicity bump from...
★★★★☆ Bellevue Hospital in New York City is nearly synonymous with mental illness, but it is so much more: One of the earliest medical facilities in the Colonies, it began as an almshouse, a...
★★☆☆☆ Peter Orner keeps books under the seat of his car “for long lights”, and has thrown one of these books from from his car’s window after reading an irksome passage. He flings books...
★★★★☆ 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,...
★★★★☆ Michael Cunningham’s tiny take on ten fairy tales is filled with wondrous things. Equal to his prose in these re-imagined stories are superb drawings by Yuko Shimizu: reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s best work,...
★★★☆☆ A Life Discarded is the fragmented story of an unremarkable, anonymous life. The mere fact that an author deemed this saga worth telling is itself curious. In Cambridge, England, biographer Alexander Masters came...
