Publishers tend to shift gears as the season shifts to autumn. Suddenly, or so it seems, the slower and more idling pace of summer is shed and all manner of books—serious, scholarly, frivolous, practical, and everything along the spectrum—begin crowding the publishers’ lists. The new releases tables at the bookstores become crowded with choices, and the sedimentary layers of those choices only deepen as the gift-giving holidays of winter begin to draw near.
The annals of ancient history contain hundreds, maybe thousands of named battles, and the vast majority of them are unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated students of history. If you mention the Battle of Tegyra to a random sampling of people on a crowded city bus, you're likely to see onl…
Publisher W.W. Norton's long and excellent line of annotated editions (highlights of which include Annie Gauger's edition of “The Wind in the Willows” and Leslie Klinger's edition of “Dracula”) continues with this slim, abundantly-packed edition of Virginia Woolf's 1925 masterpiece, “Mrs. Da…
The new book from economic historian Adam Tooze, “Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy,” takes his career-long concentration on finance in history and brings it right to the doorstep of the present day: instead of studying the economics of Nazi Germany or the international markets i…
Allen Guelzo's new book is a biography of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and as Guelzo himself makes clear, his book is the latest in a very, very long line of similar works. Full-length hagiographies of the man began appearing almost immediately after his death in 1870. John Esten Cooke…
In “Innovation,” the sixth and last volume in Peter Ackroyd's multi-volume history of England, the 20th century in all its calamitous variety finally comes into view, and that presents both distinctive perils and distinctive rewards. Ackroyd himself was born mid-century and therefore lived t…
Imagine a big fat goggle-eyed carp that somehow has scrabbling claws. No? Okay, try picturing a leather sofa that's even more eager to eat you than to eat your pocket change. Too odd? Alright, what about this: take a plump sheep, sheer it bald, give it the aforementioned scrabbling claws, f…
