Book Reviews

To quote playwright Alan Bennett: “If not quite a platform, a play is certainly a plinth, a small eminence from which to address the world, hold forth about one’s concerns or the concerns of one’s […]

I do not think Harold Bloom believed in immortality, only long life (he died at age 89 in 2019).  What he called poetic immortality was merely extreme longevity, for even Shakespeare will lose literary relevance […]

Review written by Conlan Salgado   This is not the age of poetry, nor of great personalities. No one really knows at all what this is the age of, but I think when it is […]

Review by Dr. M. Emanuele The book Elizabeth and Monty by Charles Casillo is an enlightening glimpse of the intertwined lives of the movie icons Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Although there are numerous salacious […]

Dr. Paul Rahe (Hillside College, Michigan), has now published 4 volumes in his history of Sparta. The Spartan Regime (2016) served as a prelude to this series on the foreign policy of Sparta. It was […]

Review by Dr M. Emanuele As I began to read Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg, I was faced with a conundrum. Within the first 20 pages I was ready to put it down – […]

In this first of a projected two-volume work, Nicholas McDowell (Univ. of Exeter) offers “a biography of the mind” of the young Milton, “before he became renowned as the writer of the greatest narrative poem […]

Courtroom dramas did not begin with Perry Mason. The origins of the legal system used in most Western countries can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, which is still a fertile source for […]

It is amazing that author Rick Reilly can say so much about Donald Trump’s personality based on a golf game. So much, in fact, it fills a whole book: Commander in Cheat. Reilly contends you […]

The city of Detroit has certainly not fared well of late, but this book by Paul Vachon takes the long view, starting as it does a million years ago when the topography of Michigan was […]