Year Zero, A History of 1945 In American culture, an enduring image of the end of World War II is “The Kiss,” a photograph of
The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature Midway through The Bohemians, Ben Tarnoff describes “the seed of California humor”
ME BEFORE YOU British novelist Jojo Moyes has written more than a romantic novel with Me Before You. The story takes place in a small
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War December 7, 1941 came and five Hollywood directors went. John Ford, George Stevens,
In Redeployment, Phil Klay joins some heady company in American writing about war. His short stories here may be favorably compared with those of Tim
A note to my fellow book club members and others who have books they have cleverly avoided reading: We hearty readers of the Clayton Community
The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food Admittedly, I take food for granted. Supermarket tomatoes and peaches tend to slice
Edie Kiglatuk Mysteries M. J. McGrath’s mysteries, featuring half-Inuit Edie Kiglatuk and a frozen northern landscape, effectively meld two domains, two historic layers of past
Vera Brittain was in many ways a typical female product of a slightly repressive, prosperous, late Victorian family. Despite the potential stultification, she developed an
Hamilton, the biography and Hamilton, The Musical My son-in-law encouraged me to read Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. I bought it but didn’t read it until my
Lafayette in the SOMEWHAT United States I’d venture a guess that few adults remember their 11th grade American history class as being particularly humorous. After all,
The Portable Veblen Madcap lunacy! The phrase that best describes Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel, The Portable Veblen, is “madcap lunacy.” McKenzie names her heroine after Norwegian
UNDER THE HARROW – A HARROWING TALE OF GRIEF Flynn Berry adopts her title from a C. S. Lewis classic, A Grief Observed: “Come, what
The Girl Before The first mystery to be solved: who is JP Delaney? Before writing any book review, I generally check online to see what
THE FARAWAY NEARBY Rebecca Solnit’s collection of nature essays The Faraway Nearby has a distinctive, graceful prose style that in some passages leaves this reader giddy with
ANGLE OF REPOSE Because it is a new year doesn’t mean a reviewed book has to be new. If Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose hadn’t
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