I read, write and listen in Southern California.
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In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates …
Charles Dickens: Our mutual friend (2002, Modern Library)
Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it …
One of the most influential and imaginative writers of the past twenty years turns his attention to London - with …
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita …
The Difference Engine (1990) is an alternative history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is widely regarded as …
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a …
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an …
Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit (Collected Works of Charles Dickens) (Hardcover, 2000, Classic Books)
Upon its publication in 1857, Little Dorrit immediately outsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of William Dorrit, imprisoned …
From a cover blurb: As any herpetologist will tell you, the fer-de-lance is among the …
Rex Stout's Nero Wolf series is delightful light reading. Easily devoured, satisfying yet not too heavy.
Written with inside access, comprehensive research, and a down-to-earth perspective, Phasers on Stun! chronicles the entire history of Star Trek, …
William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire is the preeminent popular history of civilization's …
Best viewed as a work of historical fiction , this book is riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods along with sometimes wild assertions delivered as fact by a writer who covers his dishonest tracks by admitting in his own author's notes that the work does not aspire to any sort of scholarship. There is little, if any, original research here and the secondary sources used are often distorted to satisfy the writer's sometimes quite strange interpretations of historical events. Yet some academics and the public at large ate up this work, which amounts to literary and intellectual empty carbs -- it tastes great but is ultimately bad for you.
