Book Reviews

Summer Dog Days–Time for Streaming & Reading August 2023 All Things Italy 

Dear Friends:  Since returning from Italy last month, I’ve hunkered down in Missouri. On a neighborhood walk this week, I saw some local grapes fattening...

A Sicilian Memoir: Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island

Mandarins and pears at an open market in Sicily. Photo: Andrew Malone , Wikimedia Commons via Flickr Mary Taylor Simeti’s memoir of...

A Privileged Perspective: On Escaping A Stricken Field

Cover of 1940 edition of Martha Gellhorn's A Stricken Field In January, reading Anne Boyd Rioux’s review essay of Martha Gellhorn’s...
Cover of book Precious and Adored

A Valentine’s and Presidents’ Day Book: Precious and Adored

Cover of Laskey and Ehrenhalt's book, Precious and Adored Here's a book suited for both Valentine's and Presidents' Day. No, it's...

Timothy Miller on Communes in America, 1975-2000

For anyone interested in alternative communities in the US, Tim Miller's book on the last quarter of the 20th century is a thorough and accessible...

Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers & The Good Life

Mark Sundeen's book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America Mark Sundeen's The Unsettlers: In Search of the...

An American Woman in 19th-Century Palestine

Occasionally I read a not-recently-published book that moves me so that I wonder how I missed it when it first appeared. ...

Transitions in Gender and Spirituality: Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka

In the spring of 1962, within a month of my birth and just before his death, Lobzang Jivaka finished composing his spiritual autobiography in India....

Savory Bites

"Savory Bites: Books on Eating in Early America," appeared in Early American Literature 50.2 (2015).  On the hot topic of food and literature, it considers...

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri  (Knopf 2016)

Jhumpa Lahiri begins her memoir of two years in Italy with a water metaphor. Rather than thirst in Rome’s heat or a watery rebirth, the...