A book built on two literary elites arguing about the translation of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem “Eugene Onegin” may not sound like thrilling reading. While I won’t say it’s on par with Stuart Woods or Lee Child, Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship is … Continue reading
When I was an undergrad at Illinois State University many years ago, a writing workshop classmate of mine claimed that he and some friends had made a visit to Lawrence, Kansas in hopes of meeting William S. Burroughs, who was living there at the time. Not only had they met him, he said, but they’d … Continue reading
Wes Moore got the idea for his nonfiction work The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates when he heard about another man named Wes Moore who had recently been involved in the violent robbery of a jewelry store. The author wondered how the two of them, who were roughly the same age and from … Continue reading
The kidnapping of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, by the Symbionese Liberation Army was one of the strangest events of the 1970s. It moved beyond strange when Hearst, now using the name Tania, was seen carrying a machine gun and assisting with the SLA’s holdup of the Hibernia Bank in San … Continue reading
It’s likely there have been enough books on the Wright brothers to fill up every inch of a small, or maybe even a medium size, library, but in The Wright Brothers, his new biography of the pioneers of flight, award-winning historian David McCullough adds another very worthy and very accessible volume on Wilbur and Orville. Continue reading
Like many people, I have always been fascinated by the Kennedys. For a long time, I knew nothing about Rosemary, so I was excited to read that a credible author was telling Rosemary’s story. But it turned out to be a lot more than a biography. It is really the story of the entire Kennedy … Continue reading
David Bowie has often been viewed, and sometimes criticized, as a musician who needs to collaborate with other more cutting edge musical artists in order to produce his best work. In David Bowie: Starman, his thorough biography of the rock chameleon, Paul Trynka does not try to dispute this claim. He looks at it more … Continue reading
