Archive
stevereads: book reviews and commentary by Steve Donoghue
It’s been two blessed years since the New York Review of Books reprinted John Williams’s flatulently boring 1965 novel Stoner and the presumably bored grandees of the book-chat world surprised all rational people by taking it up as some sort of lost classic and singing its praises from every literary pulpit in the English-speaking world. […]
Read MoreOur book today is a gorgeous 1974 Thames & Hudson volume called The English Country House: an art and a way of life, written by Olive Cook with loads of great photos by A. F. Kersting. The book has one of the most interesting and charming subjects of them all to examine, and it opens […]
Read MoreOur book today is another recent Brattle find: Enrico Dandolo & The Rise of Venice, a 2003 study of medieval Venice (and its most remarkable citizen, whose life spanned almost the whole of the twelfth century) by Thomas Madden, who has a wonderful way of scraping away the romantic veneer of post-Renaissance Venice and showing […]
Read MoreOur book today is an oversized ‘coffee table’ treat, Vincenzo Labella’s lavishly illustrated 1990 tour of the Italian Renaissance, A Season of Giants, 1492-1508: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael. Labella claims right from the start that his book centers on three titanic artistic geniuses of the period, and when it comes to those three, our author never […]
Read MoreOur book today is By My Hand, the new Commissario Ricciardi mystery by Maurizio DeGiovanni – a richly textured and enormously enjoyable series starring a morose young police detective in 1930s Naples who, since his childhood, has had a gift – or, from his own viewpoint, suffered under a curse – that helps him in […]
Read MoreMy last experience with the every-other-month Boston Public Library books sale was so pleasing – not just the sight of lots of enthusiastic young people eagerly browsing the books but also a near-complete paperback set of Patrick O’Brian’s magnificent series of Aubrey/Maturin novels – that I hardly hesitated this morning to make the short trip […]
Read MoreOur book today is Saladin, the great 2008 biography by Director of Research at Paris’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Anne-Marie Edde, now at last available in a sturdy paperback in an English-language translation by Jane Marie Todd. And although six years is a disgracefully long gap between French intellectual curiosity and American intellectual […]
Read More… and we’re not talking about cover prices, although they’re expensive enough (it really does make palm-to-forehead sense to subscribe to any magazine you regularly read). No, the real price for reading a lot of the Penny Press is the garbage you confront on your way to reading the good stuff. This is true […]
Read MoreOur book today is a bit of a specialty item, I readily admit: it’s the sturdy volume commissioned and printed in order to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the venerable Boston Atheneum, Boston’s great private library, and right away we’re on squishy ground, since the long and torturous history of the Atheneum could admit […]
Read MoreThe dog days of summer have settled into place (although it’s resolutely refusing to feel that way in the entire eastern half of North America), and all my young friends over on BookTube are happily ensconced in making their July book-videos – very much including the book “hauls” they somehow manage to take in despite […]
Read MoreOur book today is 1981’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell, the pen name taken by Sarah Cockburn, the witty and delightful sister of famed muckraking journalists Patrick, Alexander, and Andrew Cockburn. She was a London barrister in the eccentric Rumpole mode, and in the down-time from her busy legal profession, she wrote murder […]
Read MoreOur book today is the utterly charming A Gathering of Shore Birds, a 1960 compilation of the wonderful bird-life columns Dr. Henry Marion Hall wrote for Audubon Magazine more than half a century ago. The editors at Devon-Adair (as the outfit used to be in palmier days, happy and sane) had the inspired notion to […]
Read MoreNaturally, I was eager to read Tom Junod’s piece in the new Esquire, “The State of the American Dog,” which is about the unfair stigmatizing of pit bulls in America and their subsequent skyrocketing execution rates in animals shelters across the country. And on a prose level, the piece itself doesn’t disappoint: Junod is a […]
Read MoreOur book today is The Third Reich in Power, the massive 2005 middle block volume in Richard Evans’s enormous Nazi Germany trilogy, the first volume of which covers the Hitlerian rise to power and is necessarily the sketchiest of the three and the third volume of which, The Third Reich at War (which I reviewed […]
Read MoreOur book today is A Face Turned Backward, the 1999 second installment in Lauren Haney’s delightful series of murder mysteries set in ancient Egypt and featuring stalwart (and easy on the eyes) Lieutenant Bak, commander of the Medjay police force in the frontier town of Buhen during the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. The book’s […]
Read MoreIt’s always a thing I feel a little bit ashamed to admit, but there it is: I go to comic books mainly for their artwork. I know all about the brilliance of today’s comics writing – I hear about it all the time from comics aficionados, that today’s industry writers are smarter and more literate […]
Read MoreThe 1967 episode of the original Star Trek TV series “The City on the Edge of Forever” comes up almost necessarily in any discussion of the franchise as a whole. Fans routinely rank it as one of the best episodes of the original series, and a smaller sub-set of those fans, myself included, maintain that […]
Read MoreA good many of you responded favorably to that last “Six for the Scribblers” writer-biography round-up (and some of you pointed out that the entry didn’t, in fact, include six biographies but instead only five, against which my only lame defense is to note that this is “Stevereads” not “Stevecounts”), and since there are EVER […]
Read MoreOur book today is Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1958 historical novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which made as much of a splash as any book could reasonably be expected to make. It sold briskly (thanks to an innovatively energetic ad campaign); it garnered an enviable collection of critical praise (The New York Times called it […]
Read MoreConde Nast Traveler’s latest issue is their regular celebration of islands, which the magazine’s fantastic new editor-in-chief Pilar Guzman justifies with elegant simplicity: Everything just tastes, looks, and feels better on an island. (It’s a little like how airplane altitude adds two starts – and many more tears – to every movie experience.) Maybe it’s […]
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