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★★☆☆☆ Eastern philosophy has been trickling into the Western consciousness steadily since the 60s and has been gaining popularity ever since. But no matter the part of the globe, when it comes to the...
★★★★☆ Timbuktu is a Western metaphor for the back of beyond, a place so far beyond the pale that no one wants to go there, and nothing of interest ever happens there. While that...
★★★★☆ The earliest mention of what seems to have been smallpox came in 1350 BC. Between that time and 1702 fully one tenth of all humans had been affected in some degree by the...
★★☆☆☆ The first installment of Lian Hearn’s four-volume Tale of Shikanoko series (all of which will be published this summer by FSG), Emperor of the Eight Islands is an ambitious introduction that ultimately falls...
★★★★☆ When we read, what are we reading for? A moment of escape? An adrenaline filled rush? Or is each time we open a book, we are on a quest to find something great?...
★★★★★ “Do you ever feel unfleshed?” A character asks towards the end of Don DeLillo’s horrifyingly timely new novel, Zero K. All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors...
★★★☆☆ Mischa Berlinski’s primary talent as a writer is his supreme humanity. A new writer on the literary scene, he’s already been marked as one to watch. His second novel, Peacekeeping, is good. Not...
★★★★★ 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...
