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LAND How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern WorldBy Simon Winchester We don’t talk much about land reform these days, but after reading Simon Winchester’s “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,” I am wondering whether we should. In the United States, Winchester points out, “the top 100” landowners, taken together, […]
You’d think that three wives might have been enough for Blake Nelson, the head of a Mormon household in deepest Utah who makes a nice corpse in Cate Quinn’s debut mystery, BLACK WIDOWS (Sourcebooks Landmark, 418 pp., $26.99). Rachel, the No. 1 wife and one of the story’s three narrators, is the devoted, traditional one. […]
I came late to Allie Brosh’s “Hyperbole and a Half” — later than the outspoken fan Bill Gates and numerous enthusiastic writers for Psychology Today — but when I fell, I fell hard. (I even bought the calendar.) A selection of Brosh’s autobiographical word-and-image stories from her blog of the same name (which she began […]
PICTURE THIS THIS BOOK IS LITERALLY JUST PICTURES OF SNOOZY ANIMALS THAT WILL MAKE YOU SLEEP BETTER (Smith Street Books £9.99) This Book is Literally Just Pictures of Snoozy Animals That Will Make You Sleep Better (Smith Street Books £9.99) Sometimes a book does just what it says on the tin and this is certainly […]
Rags to rhinestones! Born in poverty, Dolly Parton has been a star for 50 years and has sold 100 million records. Today, she’s a feminist icon who says she’s certainly not dumb — and not blonde either! Sarah Smarsh has penned a biography about the Queen of Country music Dolly Parton, 75, who grew up […]
Now that’s what you call ICEOLATION! Thought your lockdown was tough? William Barents and his crew were stranded in the arctic for nine agonising months with barely any food and the mercy of polar bears Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World is by author Andrea Pitzer It follows the story of William Barents’ […]
Growing up in Moscow, Sergei Lebedev honed his English, reluctantly at first and then greedily, by reading his way through his family’s library of detective fiction. His parents, geologists who often used English in their work, particularly encouraged him to read the work of the spy novelist John le Carré. Lebedev grew to appreciate le […]
Recent titles of interest: THE GOOD AMERICAN: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian, by Robert D. Kaplan. (Random House, $30.) Kaplan’s homage to a longtime aid worker highlights the potent good that functionaries can effect behind the scenes. YOU ARE NOT AMERICAN: Citizenship Stripping From Dred Scott to the Dreamers, […]
Chapter 1 He could be holding a book, a skull, or a prize melon. Instead, he has a silver teapot. We are face-to-face with an artisan and his creation, witness not to an act of making, but rather to his reflection on that act, both literally and figuratively. One skillful hand is doubled in the […]
THE COMEBACKBy E.L. Shen ANA ON THE EDGEBy A.J. Sass Gloria Steinem, while being honored in 2015 by the organization Figure Skating in Harlem, spoke about having been a skater herself at an early age. It was, she remarked, one of the few sports deemed suitable for young girls at the time. Steinem went on […]