So What: The Life of Miles Davis book by John Szwed reviewed by Tom Isler
Peter Ibbetson
They are the kind of words that give record producers ulcers and bald heads: “Hey, I don’t have my horn.” On March 29, 1954, Miles Davis uttered that phrase to…
Peter Ibbetson
The Great Tax Wars: From Lincoln to T.R. to Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America book by Steven Weismann reviewed by Susannah Camic
Albert Einstein once said that “the hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” In The Great Tax Wars, Steven Weisman attempts to prove Einstein wrong as…
The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi: The World’s Most Astonishing Number book by Mario Livio reviewed by Christopher Grobe
What do a rose, a falcon’s spiral descent, and Salvador Dali’s “Sacrament of the Last Supper” have in common? As Mario Livio explains, they all share a connection to phi,…
Erasmus and the Age of Reformation book by Johan Huizinga reviewed by Susannah Rutherglen
Johan Huizinga, the great historian of late medieval culture, was one of those rare figures in the study of ideas whose own stature and sensibility easily matched those of his…
Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories book by A.M. Holmes reviewed by Katherine Poltorak
“I am lost”—a short sentence in the first paragraph of “The Chinese Lesson”— sums up the main theme of A.M. Homes’s latest collection of short stories, Things You Should Know.…
Prague book by Arthur Phillips reviewed by Conor O’Toole
Among this novel’s unexpected features is its setting: not Prague but Budapest, Hungary, in 1990. There, a collection of North American expatriates soaks up a bit of the newly reformed…
You Shall Know Our Velocity book by David Eggers reviewed by Alexander Benaim
David Eggers’s fiction debut “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” falls staggeringly short of the high mark set by his best-selling memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” In “Genius,” Eggers…
Versailles: A Novel book by Kathryn Davis reviewed by Sophie Pinkham
In the summers of my youth, I devoured my father’s old children’s books. Among these was a collection of historical novels from the 1950s, each with the more unsavory details…
You Are Not a Stranger Here book by Adam Haslett reviewed by Marisa Knox
Writing about depression is a perilous practice. The temptation in seeking to realistically depict what Macbeth calls “the petty pace” of life for depressed people, the agonizing succession of empty…
The Partly Cloudy Patriot book by Sarah Vowell reviewed by Ellen Thompson
The Partly Cloudy Patriot makes an unusual addition to the bedstands of most readers of American history. In this motley collection, 34-year-old Sarah Vowell keenly applies the lessons of popular…