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Current books:
  • Treason on the Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio during World War II

    Treason on the Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio during World War II by Judith Keene


Recent books:

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Book Review: This Day in Music by Neil Cossar

History, some have said, is an accumulative science. Of necessity, it builds on what has come before, on what others have studied and written. Yet the building blocks are events, all of which — to the dismay of many students — are tied to particular dates. And while the dates themselves may [...]

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Book Review: Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Scarlett Thomas likes to write about big ideas. She doesn’t deviate from that in her latest novel, Our Tragic Universe. In fact, the novel is built around portentous issues like immortality and whether we are all living in a simulated universe — and the storyless story.

That’s right, the storyless story. Essentially, [...]

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Book Review: Thumbing Through Thoreau by Kenny Luck

Open any respectable book of quotations and there’s a 99.9 percent change you will see several from Henry David Thoreau. So, one might ask, is the world in need of a book consisting solely of selected quotes from Thoreau’s writing? Kenny Luck thought so, believing “we all could use a dose of Thoreau [...]

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Book Review: Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers

I recently read an an interesting comparison between two dominant strands of how we approach reading a book, particularly for reviewing — the journalistic approach and the literary criticism approach. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the observations, it does fairly define those approaches and, as this review demonstrates, I find myself largely [...]

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Book Review: The Scouting Party by David C. Scott and Brendan Murphy

When it comes to Scouting, I’m a washout. Not only didn’t I make it past Cub Scouts, tying my shoes is about as advanced as my knot repertoire gets. Fortunately, David Scott and Brendan Murphy’s The Scouting Party: Pioneering and Preservation, Progressivism and Preparedness in the Making of the Boy Scouts of America [...]

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Book Review: Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban by Jere Van Dyk

“I’m alive.”

As much incantation as statement of fact, that simple phrase had plenty of meaning for American journalist Jere Van Dyk when he was taken captive by the Taliban in February 2008 and held for 45 days. In Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban, it represents affirmation, a touch of [...]

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Book Review: Brief Lives: Leo Tolstoy by Anthony Briggs

There is an art to researching and writing biographies — at least good biographies. Although a work’s length and the amount of independent or original research may suggest how deeply a biographer delves into his subject, it certainly isn’t determinative of quality. At the same time, it is a field where the shorter [...]

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Microreview: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is one of the most innovative books I’ve read. The problem it creates for him is that it sets a pretty high bar in the minds of many readers, myself included. So, let’s start with the fact that his latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, isn’t [...]

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Book Review: Unbound by Dean King

Titling a book may well be an art form in and of itself. Undoubtedly, the goal is to not simply to attract a reader but to convey something about the book itself. I have no idea how much study or analysis went into naming Dean King’s Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, [...]

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Book Review: The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

If someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it’s the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war.

South American writers, though, [...]

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