TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (January 22, 2025): The latest issue features ‘An Individual Talent’ – T.S. Eliot’s Collected Prose…
Eliot’s prose writings in one chronological sweep
Why we should listen to those with opposing views
By Carol Tavris
How foreign money has transformed English football
By Mike Jakeman
The loss of civic space
By Ian Sansom
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 19, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The Hipster Grifter’…
In “You’ll Never Believe Me,” Kari Ferrell details going from internet notoriety to self-knowledge in a captivating, sharp and very funny memoir.
With a ban looming, publishers are hoping to pivot to new platforms, but readers fear their community of book lovers will never be the same.
Marcus Chown’s “A Crack in Everything” is a journey through space and time with the people studying one of the most enigmatic objects in the universe.
His new novel is titled after Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” he says, “given the theme of incomprehension between generations in that book.”
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (Janaury 15, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Reagan’s Make-Believe’….
Reagan: His Life and Legend
by Max Boot.
On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy
by Simon Critchley.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (January 15, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Bloomsbury treasures’ – Newly discovered poems and photographs…
John Trowsdale Yale Univ. Press (2024)
To understand the body, “we might picture the heart as a pump, the brain as a kind of computer, the lungs as bellows, the kidney as filters”. But what about the immune system — asks immunologist John Trowsdale in his engaging analysis. It has no straightforward analogy, operating simultaneously as an antiviral software, a surveillance camera, a weapons system and a way to share resources. The system is “unobtrusive yet extensive, nowhere and everywhere, redundant yet essential, powerful yet remote”.
Rowan Jacobsen Bloomsbury (2024)
When residue inside decorative pots from ancient Mexico was analysed, it yielded traces of cacao — early evidence of cocoa consumption. The Spanish word chocolate might have been influenced by the Nahuatl (Aztec) cacahuatl, or cacao water. Journalist Rowan Jacobsen’s appealing book explores wild chocolate’s history as he travels through Central and South America, meeting chocolate makers, activists and Indigenous leaders who revive the bean’s variety in taste and prestige, lost during its modern industrial manufacture.
Eds Silvia Ferrara et al. Routledge (2024)
The logo of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games was a figure with a red dot ‘head’, blue ‘body’ and single, straight green ‘leg’ — adapted from the Chinese character zhi, meaning ‘birth, life’, ‘arrival’ and ‘achievement’. It is one of a huge variety of “talking images” in a collection edited by three scholars interested in writing. Images range from Palaeolithic symbols and ancient Mesopotamian pictograms to modern Chinese calligraphy and Indian comics. The book traces links between images, marks, language and writing.
Stéphane Douady et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 12, 2025): The latest issue features ‘A Deal With The Devil’ – A.N. Wilson’s new biography of Goethe approaches its subject through his masterpiece and life’s work, the verse drama “Faust”.
Our columnist on the month’s most exciting releases.
The scion siblings at the center of Sara Sligar’s Gothic thriller “Vantage Point” try desperately to outrun the calamity that is their inheritance.
Samrat Upadhyay’s new novel, “Darkmotherland,” is a sprawling epic in which a natural disaster gives way to an authoritarian takeover.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 29, 2024): The latest issue features…
Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” was met with bafflement and awe when it appeared in 1977. Reality has finally caught up to his masterpiece.
Elaborately designed books with patterned edges and other effects started as a trend in romance and fantasy, and have now spread throughout the publishing industry.
“I get real geek joy out of learning something new,” says the imprint’s vice president and publisher. She’s proud to have broadened the definition of a classic during her tenure.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (December 26, 2024): The latest issue features…
In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.
Romeo + Juliet – a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, October 24, 2024–February 16, 2025
There is widespread relief after Assad’s fall, though no one is more aware than Syrians themselves of the dangers and challenges that await them.
In her new book, Brenda Wineapple brings to life one of the most inflamed chapters in the history of America’s culture wars: the Scopes trial of 1925.
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple
Hoover Institution (December 22, 2024): The depth of Hoover’s scholarship is reflected in the numerous books published by our fellows on a broad variety of topics and issues.
Edited by Matt Pottinger (Hoover Institution Press) Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has openly expressed his intention to annex Taiwan to mainland China, even threatening the use of force. An invasion or blockade of Taiwan by Chinese forces would be catastrophic, with severe consequences for democracies worldwide. In The Boiling Moat, Matt Pottinger and a team of scholars and distinguished military and political leaders urgently outline practical steps for deterrence.
the full proceedings from this conference—the presentations, responses, and discussions. In it, participants debate the meaning of getting monetary policy “back on track,” the significance of recent bank failures, and how to improve forecasting and oversight.
By Victor Davis Hanson (Basic Books)
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span centuries, from the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World, to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.
By H.R. McMaster (HarperCollins Publishers)
Publication Date: August 27, 2024
At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive president drive necessary shifts in US foreign policy at a critical moment in history. H.R. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyperpartisanship of American politics. With the candor of a soldier and the perspective of a historian, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump’s presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term might look like.
By Charles G. Palm (Hoover Institution Press) Foreword by Condoleezza Rice, Introduction by Stephen Kotkin
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
In late 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. Over the next 12 years, the Hoover Institution microfilmed and published the newly opened records of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State. Charles Palm, who led this mission, details how he and his colleagues secured a historic agreement with the Russian Federation, then launched and successfully carried out the joint project with the Russian State Archives and their partner, Chadwyck-Healey Ltd.
Boomers Daily 