Books Archive

Alan Furst: Blood of Victory - Countries need oil for blood, steel for bone, rubber for feet. And in wartime, even more so. Think back to your American History courses. Why did the South lose the

Alan Furst: Dark Voyage - I spent my free moments this week reading my favorite kind of book --- one you can't put down. I read on buses, as I walked, while waiting for friends at

Alan Furst: Mission to Paris - If you try to convey your enthusiasm for “Mission to Paris” to someone who has never read any of Alan Furst’s novels, you may have a hard time. These are

Alan Furst: Spies of the Balkans - It’s a bittersweet day around here when a new Alan Furst novel arrives. On the plus side: I get to spend an entire day reading about 1939 or 1940, generally in

Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent - The heroes of international thrillers are usually manly men, built on the John Wayne model. If they have inner lives, they're in flight from them. Women are simply

Alan Furst: The Spies of Warsaw - The “spy” is “an ordinary-looking man, who led a rather ordinary life” --- he's a mid-level engineer at a German ironworks, married, with three children. But as he takes the

Albert Camus: The Plague - If you were taking something like 20th Century Thought, you read it in English. If you were studying French, you struggled through it in the original. Either way, the pages are, for

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty - The Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has ended, which is just fine with me --- I saw it four times, and each time it wrung me

Alice Bliss - Tell me you wouldn’t react as I did. The name of the novel is “Alice Bliss.” That is, not surprisingly, the name of the 14-year-old main character, who lives with her

Alice Munro: Dear Life - I did not go home for my mother's last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely

All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia. With Refreshments - Salmon swim upstream, and so do the children of unhappily married Jewish women. Alex Witchel had the full cast of characters. A remote, disapproving father who once punched her in the

All in Good Time - "Welcome to the evening," the voice on the radio said, and you stopped for a minute when you heard those words, because they were so full of promise you had

All Quiet on the Western Front - The reaction to this book, from the beginning, was astonishing. Published in 1929, it sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. The film won Oscars for Best

All the King’s Men - This 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren, is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels. The 1949 film is just as great: It

All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness - Sheila Hamilton’s business is getting the story. She does it very well --- as a television reporter, she’s won five Emmys. In Portland, Oregon, where she hosts the morning drive-time

All Things Cease to Appear - STEPHEN KING: "Ghosts, murder, a terrifying psychotic who seems normal, and beautiful writing. Loved it." ---- Where do books come from? Unlikely places. For Elizabeth Brundage, “All Things Cease to Appear” came

Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City’s Lower East Side - The Hare With Amber Eyes is now available in paperback. You can still be among the first in your zip code to read it --- and then press it on

American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop - Susan Mary Alsop (1918-2004) was a society beauty who morphed into a great saloniste and hostess, but the best reason I found to read this 193-page biography is that it

An Inconvenient Truth - An Inconvenient Truth