All Book Reviews
'Daughters of the Samurai' profiles three remarkable women who influenced modern Japanese historyThe true and fascinating story of three 19th-century Japanese girls who 'spanned the globe and became fluent in two worlds at once.'
'The Wright Brothers' is David McCullough's affectionate portrait of aviation's pioneering brothersMcCullough, who belongs to what might be called the triumphalist school of American history, gives Wilbur and Orville Wright heroic treatment.
'God Help the Child' is Toni Morrison's latest exploration of the hurt that drives usIn her eleventh novel, the Nobel Prize winner continues to create beauty from the anger and defining wounds of her characters.
'Mapmaker' pits a young intern against time and technologyIn this taut and techy tale, protagonist Tanya Barrett must battle powerful enemies to uncover the truth about her father and herself.
'The Turner House' 鈥� a magnificent, unsentimental debut 鈥� visits the struggles of Detroit through one family's history'Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do,' notes Angela Flournoy in her evocative novel about the complicated feelings connected to a family home.
'Another Little Piece of My Heart' is the 'unauthoritative' memoir of one of America's first rock criticsRichard Goldstein offers a first-hand report of '60s counter-culture and rock.
'Dreamland' is the must-read book about America's heroin crisisAward-winning journalist Sam Quinones combines thorough research with superlative narrative skills to produce a horrifying but compulsively readable book about opiate addiction in the United States.
Celebrated poet Jane Hirshfield explains poetry as 鈥榓 truing of vision鈥�Hirshfield offers essays, poems that inspire fresh views of the familiar.
'This Present Moment' shares poet, environmentalist Gary Snyder's personal insightsSnyder's new work focuses on the here and now.
'Swan Song 1945' illustrates war-time suffering using ordinary German voicesAs part of a 35-year project, Walter Kempowski brought together bits and pieces of German diaries, letters, and autobiographies.
'In Montmartre' tells a compulsively readable story of 20th-century artSue Roe travels to Paris to track the birth of modernist art 鈥� one of the most interesting tales in all of art history.
'All the Wild that Remains' honors two great authors of the American WestEdward Abbey and Wallace Stegner 鈥� opposites in character and temperament 鈥� shared an abiding love of America west of the hundredth meridian.
'The Shadow of the Crescent Moon' mourns the damage done in PakistanThis novel of life in a Pakistan gripped by violence comes from the daughter of one of the country's political dynasties.
'Moral Agents' dissects the critics who shaped mid-20th-century literatureOne of today鈥檚 most trenchant literary critics digs into some of the voices who defined American letters for their generation.
'American Warlord' struggles to tell an important story about West AfricaThe stories of former Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor and his son Chucky highlight the suffering of the Liberian people.
'Target Tokyo' offers a gripping retelling of the Doolittle raid, complete with new detailJames Scott has written the definitive account of the 1942 Doolittle raid on Tokyo.
'Odysseus Abroad' views 'heroism' in the Age of Thatcher with gentle ironyA 22-year-old Indian-born man wakes up on an average day in his 1985 London studio apartment and sets off on a journey to see his uncle.
'The Discreet Hero' spins extortion, arson, adultery, and mysticism into literary fictionMaster of political intrigue and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa crafts a thriller of extortion and revenge on Peru鈥檚 northern coast.
'The Harder They Come' is T. Coraghessan Boyle's latest foray into the wild and weirdA troubled young man heads off the grid in the California woods 鈥� but has he gone wild or gone mad?
'Women of Will' argues that to know Shakespeare, you must know his womenTina Packer delves into the psychological and social roles Shakespeare's female characters play and their impact on others.
