 |
|
|
|
|
| Featured Reviews |
|
|  | Banville, John THE INFINITIES
February 15, 2010 - The Booker Prize-winning Irish author's 15th novel is a (perhaps excessively) droll romantic comedy reminiscent of both Shakespeare's gossamer romps and Iris Murdoch's playful metaphysical gameswomanship...It's an unexpected offering from the creator of such mordant psychodramas as Ghosts (1993), Eclipse (2001) and Shroud (2003), though mortality and all its disagreeable attributes are its subject
|
| | Wouk, Herman THE LANGUAGE GOD TALKS
February 15, 2010 - In a crowded book market filled with self-serving and redundant theories about humankind's place in the grand scheme, it is rare to encounter an original, honest, charming voice. Such is the case with Wouk's latest work. The author's journey began with an innocent but daunting challenge from the great Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman
|
| Current Issue: Fiction |
|
 | de Moor, Margriet THE STORM
March 15, 2010 - In the winter of 1953, hurricane-driven flood waters rushing in from the North Sea destroyed dikes and obliterated an entire province in the southwestern Netherlands—a territory which "lay embedded between two arms of the sea that did what arms |
| Epstein, Joseph THE LOVE SONG OF A. JEROME MINKOFF
March 15, 2010 - Epstein (In a Cardboard Belt!, 2007, etc.) creates his characters with deft strokes. The story that gives the collection its title is one of the author's most typical, as well as one of his best. Three years earlier the somewhat Prufrockian Dr. A. |
| Levy, Andrea THE LONG SONG
March 15, 2010 - July is fathered by a brutish overseer named Tam Dewar and born to a field slave named Kitty. She's seized from her mother, renamed "Marguerite," brought into the plantation house and trained to be the housemaid, chief aide and ultimately confidante |
| Current Issue: Nonfiction |
|
| Bellos, Alex HERE'S LOOKING AT EUCLID
March 15, 2010 - Though he has an Oxford degree in math, former Guardian reporter Bellos (Futebol: Soccer: The Brazilian Way, 2002) approaches the subject as an enthusiastic amateur. He begins at the most basic level, with the concept of number itself, looking at |
| Fraser, Evan D.G. EMPIRES OF FOOD
March 15, 2010 - In a follow-up to their previous collaboration, Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World (2008), Fraser (Environmental Studies/Leeds Univ.) and Improper Bostonian managing editor Rimas draw important lessons from the |
| Remnick, David THE BRIDGE
March 15, 2010 - World-ranging because, writes the author, "Barack Obama's family, broadly defined, is vast. It's multi-confessional, multiracial, multi-lingual, and multi-continental." One of his half brothers, born in Africa, lives in China; a cousin is a rabbi; |
| Rosen, William THE MOST POWERFUL IDEA IN THE WORLD
March 15, 2010 - In 1829, George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket inaugurated the age of steam-powered locomotion, hauling with it a rich lineage of previous inventions mostly by enterprising men in the Anglosphere—"Great Britain and its former colonies, including the |
| Schoenfeld, Gabriel NECESSARY SECRETS
March 15, 2010 - In December 2005, basing its article on leaked documents, the New York Times reported the details of a National Security Agency program to tap al-Qaeda phone calls and e-mails, which the paper characterized as unambiguously illegal. President Bush |
| Ziegelman, Jane 97 ORCHARD
March 15, 2010 - Ziegelman (co-author: Foie Gras: A Passion, 1999) offers the stories of five immigrant families who lived in the building sometime between 1863, when it opened, and 1935. The author's research is both astonishing in its dimensions and enlightening |
| Current Issue: Children's |
|
| Barton, Chris SHARK VS. TRAIN
March 15, 2010 - With two boys at a toy chest, one clutching a shark and the other a train, thus begins the most unlikeliest of competitions. Who will win—shark or train? Well, it does depend on the situation. If underwater, the shark will surely triumph. But at |
| Clements, Andrew BENJAMIN PRATT AND THE KEEPERS OF THE SCHOOL
March 15, 2010 - Sixth-grader Ben Pratt is thrust into a mystery-adventure when his school's janitor shoves a gold coin in his hand, passing on the responsibility to save Oakes School from developers. Captain Oakes gave the school to the community back in 1783; its |
| Cushman, Karen ALCHEMY AND MEGGY SWANN
March 15, 2010 - Queen Elizabeth I is on the throne. London is a sprawling, chaotic city that teems with all manner of humanity. Meggy has come to London ostensibly to serve her alchemist father, a man she has never met. When he rejects her because she is not male |
| Gephart, Donna HOW TO SURVIVE MIDDLE SCHOOL (WITHOUT GETTING YOUR HEAD FLUSHED,) AND DEAL WITH AN EX-BEST FRIEND,...UM, GIRLS, AND A HEARTBREAKING HAMSTER
March 15, 2010 - David Greenberg, would-be future anchor of The Daily Show, enters middle school with problems: Longtime best friend Elliott has abandoned him for new, nastier and bigger friends, David hasn't spoken with his runaway mother in months and he's |
| Green, John WILL GRAYSON, WILL GRAYSON
March 15, 2010 - Will Grayson loves indie rock, plays the eye-rolling angry stepchild to his extraordinarily giant, lovable, gay best friend Tiny Cooper and doesn't realize that he yearns for his other indie-rock–loving friend Jane until it's too late. will grayson |
| Hole, Stian GARMANN'S STREET
March 15, 2010 - In another unusual and sensitive intergenerational story, a follow-up to the Batchelder Honor book Garmann's Summer (2008), the anxious, introspective Norwegian boy now frets about Roy, a bully from the fourth grade. While standing near the |
| Jackson, Shelley MIMI'S DADA CATIFESTO
March 15, 2010 - This engaging picture book delivers a pleasurable story, dazzling artwork and a fascinating introduction to Dadaism. "For a cat with the soul of an artist, only an artist will do," states Mimi the cat. She meets her match when she smells an |
| Lichtenheld, Tom BRIDGET'S BERET
March 15, 2010 - Bridget thinks she gets her artistic abilities from the black beret she, along with all the Great Artists, always wears. So when she loses it, her career is over. Days later, her sister asks the stymied Bridget if she'll paint a sign for a lemonade |
| Richards, Jame THREE RIVERS RISING
March 15, 2010 - Told in free verse with multiple voices, this novel dramatically recreates the impact of the historic tragedy of the Johnstown, Pa., flood on the lives of six people from 1888 to 1889. At the heart of the story is Celestia's love for Peter, an |
| Ryan, Pam Mu˜oz THE DREAMER
March 15, 2010 - Ryan's fictional evocation of the boy who would become Pablo Neruda is rich, resonant and enchanting. Simple adventures reveal young Neftal"'s painful shyness and spirited determination, his stepmother's love and his siblings' affection and his |
| Sedgwick, Marcus REVOLVER
March 15, 2010 - "Even the dead tell stories," begins Sedgwick's slim yet taut and complex thriller about a family barely surviving in 1910 along the Swedish-Finnish border, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Sig pieces together the story his father, Einar |
| Seeger, Laura Vaccaro WHAT IF?
March 15, 2010 - What if two seals are playing with a beach ball and it rolls up on shore? What if one seal lumbers out of the water to retrieve the ball and finds another seal on land to play with? Seeger, who loves to play with perspective, presents three |
| Sidman, Joyce UBIQUITOUS
March 15, 2010 - Sidman delights with another gorgeous collection of poems celebrating the natural world, this time focusing on species remarkable for their ability to adapt and thrive in an often-harsh world. Arranging her "survivors" in chronological order of time |
|
|
|
|
| Online Exclusive
|
| The Arabian Nights: A New Edition
March 01, 2010 - The most famous tales in The Arabian Nights have flown far beyond the confines of the night-shrouded bedroom in which Scheherazade spins stories to the vengeful king who will kill her come morning (unless she makes sure he just has to know what happens next). "There is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories," writes Middle East scholar Robert Irwin in his introduction to Volume 2 of Penguin Classics' new three-volume edition. So should we care that Cambridge University scholars Malcolm and Ursula Lyons, for the first time since Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s, have based this English translation on the 1839-42 Arabic edition that contains more stories than any other, usually in fuller versions? We should
|
|
|
|
|
.gif)
