Book Nook

The title of Chloe Shaw’s fantastic new book, “What is a Dog?” has as many answers as there are dog-owners. 

 Crime fiction writers have complete control over their material. They can create dialogue, see into characters’ minds, plant clues and red herrings, and tie things up in a neat bundle by the book’s end. They can also delete whatever isn’t working or add what might be missing after the first…

The “Six Tudor Queens” project begun by novelist and historian Allison Weir comes to its conclusion with this final volume, “Katharine Parr: The Sixth Wife,” a novel about the last wife of England's King Henry VIII. The series began years ago with a thick volume telling the life and unhappy …

“You are a wonderful example of a shell game with your soul as the pea,” wrote Charles Rawlings, the first husband of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the celebrated author of “The Yearling.” “God knows which walnut shell you will find it under next. If anyone asks you what you are, tell them that.”

The premise of Catherine Raven's irresistible book “Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship” is what a cynical Hollywood operator might call “pure gold.” Raven, a National Park ranger, builds herself an off-the-grid house deep in the remote wilderness of Montana, where she can read and enjoy sol…

There are several thousand points of interest held in public trust for Americans to enjoy but few of them inspire so much interest, loyalty, and sheer affection as the Appalachian Trail (AT). Completed in 1937, it stretches for over 2,000 miles through 14 states, from Mount Katahdin in Maine…

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor, who won a wide readership with his earlier books “American Colonies” and “American Revolutions,” adds an invigoratingly strong new volume to one of the most bracing and thought-provoking sequences of American histories ever written. “American Rep…

Edward Rutherford’s historical fictions have won him a wide reading audience and that audience knows their patterns: they are Michener-style productions, taking some enormous setting—all of England, all of London, all Russia—and fleshing it out over a thousand pages and many generations of c…

Anthologies are well-known as chronicles of their times and the tastes of their days, and two new ones accidentally combine to form the picture of an entire age. “The Golden Age of the American Essay 1945-1970,” edited by the great anthologist Philip Lopate, presents 38 pieces written and pu…

On on level, Harvard University English professor Louis Menand's new book “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War” is about the explosion of voices – social and artistic – that happened in America in the wake of the Second World War. On this level, it's understandable that somebody …

Given the fact that it’s one of the biggest historical events since the Second World War, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is a natural lure to historians. In the months since this novel coronavirus escaped from first Wuhan and then mainland China, three million people have died of the virus, w…

Technologist and “data artist” Jer Thorp opens his fascinating new book “Living in Data” with a dramatic anecdote—in fact, they don’t get much more dramatic: He’s on a boat in Africa’s Okavango Delta when a hippo charges at him through the water. 

The May book season has its headliner titles—three of the best-selling nonfiction writers of the day, “The Premonition” by Michael Lewis, “Freedom” by Sebastian Junger, and “Doom” by Niall Ferguson. These titles will get reviewed widely, and they’ll set a large amount of the bookish discours…

   “A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent,” wrote a snooty bookish professional in the 20th century who had never, obviously, produced a bestseller in a lifetime of writing. Writers who’ve never had a bestseller have often reflexively dismissed the whole phenomenon as some ki…