Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In early March 2022, at Berenike, a barren spot on the shores of the Red Sea, a team of archaeologists made several remarkable finds. From…
Category: Nonfiction
The Blue-Cliff Record by David Hinton
Shambhala Review by David Starkey Those of us who are not practicing Buddhists, but are still “Zen-curious,” can turn for modest enlightenment to classics like Alan Watts’ The Way of…
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee
Norton Review by David Starkey I bought my copy of Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism after visiting an exhibition at the National Gallery…
What Nails It by Greil Marcus
Yale Review by George Yatchisin Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already…
Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
4th ESTATE London Review by Brian Tanguay During his long career as a foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk won the Orwell Prize, the Martha Gellhorn Prize, and was seven times named…
Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich
Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay The demise of John W. Stephens is emblematic of the challenge that faced Ulysses S. Grant and the proponents of Reconstruction. In the eyes of…
Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter by Ian Mortimer
Rosetta Review by Walter Cummins Most of us tend to consider the Middle Ages and those who inhabited those distant centuries victims of an inferior world that we’re fortunate to…
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss
Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay No journalist that I’m aware of has chronicled the rise of the Christian right as assiduously and comprehensively as Katherine Stewart has. From her first…
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi
Metropolitan Books Review by Brian Tanguay Of the many books Rashid Khalidi has written about Palestine, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is by far his most personal one. Khalidi…