Archive
stevereads: book reviews and commentary by Steve Donoghue
Last week’s New Yorker started off with a letter, written by Jane Scholz, that I’ll quote in full: As is the case with the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, the tragic death of any young person is an incredibly sad event, wharever the cause. I object, however, to the effort of some of [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Sarah Bradford’s 1996 biography Elizabeth: A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen, and seeing it on my shelves always reminds me of a frequent quip by an old friend of mine, a Boston trial lawyer with (as Agatha Christie might put it) a brain like a bacon-slicer: when you want something [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a 1883 collection of odd ruminations by Percy Fitzgerald called Recreations of a Literary Man (or Does Writing Pay?), one in a virtually endless stream of books Fitzgerald produced once he left off prosperous lawyering in Ireland and made his way to teeming, word-drunk Victorian London to try his hand at [...]
Read MoreIt’s almost never a clean sweep in my weekly Penny Press – almost always, I’ve got to suffer through annoying garbage in order to enjoy the fine stuff (especially since I tend to read everything in every issue – sometimes on my first go-through I’ll skip around, but then the ol’ Irish Guilt kicks in [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a delightful little oddity from 1980: Cityside Countryside, subtitled “A Journey to Two Places.” It’s a collection of columns by two talented journalists: Nathan Cobb, then a features writer for The Boston Globe, and John Cole, the co-founder and then-editor of the Maine Times, and the columns act in dialogue with [...]
Read MoreOur book today is 1982′s mystery novel Light Thickens, the last book written by the great New Zealand mystery author Ngaio Marsh (by far the most deceptively cerebral of the four “Queens of Crime”) before she died in harness that same year at the ripe old age of 86 (ripe and hypothetical, since in the [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted, represent the tip of an iceberg – which can sound strange when we’re talking about fairly ancient works whose physical survival was certainly no given thing, but which is certainly true when it comes to records dealing with the Frankish emperor Charles the Great, known to all subsequent times [...]
Read MoreWell, I finally read “Requiem for a Dream,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker piece on Aaron Swartz, and I needn’t have been as worried about it as I was – mainly because MacFarquhar is one hell of a good writer (who, I presume, had nothing to do with the ridiculous hyperbole of her piece’s title). It’s [...]
Read MoreA little (OK, a bit) frisson of horror at a picture in the latest National Geographic: the story is that gangs of baboons in the Cape Town area have grown progressively bolder and more organized at stealing stuff from humans – “Raiding baboons open doors, yank out windows, and remove roof tiles” says one researcher, [...]
Read MoreThe Penny Press has been mostly behaving itself lately, which is an oddly mixed blessing. When I’m happily reading along, encountering one great piece after another while ensconced in my hole-in-the-wall lunch-time getaway, of course I’m intellectually satisfied (and once again mystified as to how other thinking readers somehow get along without such a steady [...]
Read MoreEven if I hadn’t seen Hilary Mantel’s now-infamous piece in the 21 February London Review of Books, I’d certainly have heard about it by now. I’ve written quite a bit on the Tudors, and I’ve written quite a bit on the Windsors, and I’ve written quite a bit on Mantel – even if I’d somehow [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics seem to come along at just the right time – actually a great many of them do, but this time was just right for Maurice Evans’ wonderful 1977 edition of that lost, sparkling diamond-mine of English literature, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The Arcadia got its start in the [...]
Read MoreWhich isn’t to say that issue of The New Republic had only one noteworthy item – far from it! I confess, I was worried after the first issue of the redesign. I knew TNR had been bought by a 15-year-old Internet gazillionaire, and I naturally assumed that could never be a good thing. I envisioned [...]
Read MoreNovelist Ian McEwan writes a deliberately provocative little squib for the newly-redesigned New Republic (disastrously redesigned as well – it disappears on the newsstand, especially this current issue, which for no particular reason has no cover illustration, just the boring new logo on a field of white), something called “The God That Fails” and sub-titled [...]
Read MoreAvunculicide would be just as accurate, since of course we’re referring to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who in 1483 became King of England after having disposed of the niggling little obstacle of the previous king of England, 14-year-old Edward V, who’d become king upon the death of his father, Edward IV, Richard’s brother. Young Edward [...]
Read MoreIt was a decidedly non-literary day at Ye Olde PO Box: no Arion, no TLS, no London Review of Books, no New York Review of Books … not even the New York Times Book Review to further the ongoing necessary inquiry. Instead, almost as a warning of the lower elevations head, there was a new issue [...]
Read MoreOur book today is E. Phillips Oppenheim’s 1910 thriller, The Illustrious Prince, which opens right away, on Page 1, with an inadvertent thrill delivered right over the heads of its contemporary readers and right to the reading cortex of its 21st Century audience. In the opening scene, a luxury liner has missed its evening tide [...]
Read MoreJosiah for President by Martha Bolton Zondervan, 2012 “If you can’t trust the Amish, who can you trust?” asks a gushing voter in Martha Bolton’s debut novel, Josiah for President, and like jesting Pilate, does not stay for an answer. Bolton may be a first-time novelist, but she’s an old hand at writing, with over [...]
Read MoreMy usual one-two combination of The London Review of Books and the TLS always has a huge amount of long, meaty, scholarly piece of literary journalism – that’s why I’ve been coming back to them every week since before most of you were born. And this last week was no exception, with plenty of great, [...]
Read MoreAs usual, the latest National Geographic contained wonders – and as usual, many of those wonders were distinctly familiar to me! That’s one of the best things about the magazine, for those of its readers who’ve seen a bit of the world: the best photographers in the business work every month to bring it all [...]
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