Steve Donoghue

2 weeks ago | openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its MakerBy Zachary LeaderThe Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2025Zachary Leader, no minor biographer himself with seminal works on Kingsley Amis and especially Saul Bellow, devotes his new book to a joint study of a biography and a biographer: Richard Ellmann and his mammoth 1959 biography of James Joyce, titled James Joyce.

2 weeks ago | openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue

The Mending of Broken Bones: A Modern Guide to Classical AlgebraBy Paul LockhartThe Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2025Paul Lockhart, a long-time mathematics instructor and for decades an algebra teacher at Saint Anne’s School in Brooklyn, opens his new book, The Mending of Broken Bones with an old problem – a very old problem, from a Babylonian stone tablet dating to roughly 1850 BC:I found a stone but did not weigh it.

2 weeks ago | openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue

Is a River Alive? By Robert MacfarlaneWW Norton 2025Since the answer to the question posed in Robert Macfarlane’s new book isa simple “no,” readers, including his legion of loyal fans, must seek elsewhere for the point of Is a River Alive?

3 weeks ago | openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue

Boccaccio: A BiographyBy Marco SantagataTranslated by Emlyn EisenachUniversity of Chicago Press 2025Italian literature professor Marco Santagata died in 2020 of COVID-19, and now, thanks to the University of Chicago Press, his final work, 2019’s Boccaccio: Fragilità de un genio, appears in an English-language translation by Emlyn Eisenach.

3 weeks ago | openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue

Mark TwainBy Ron ChernowPenguin Press 2025It’s a reliable axiom: the more prominent the biographer, the less interesting the biographer’s books. Simon Callow’s thoroughly excellent biographical volumes on Orson Welles can act as a happy exception, but in general, the more high-profile a biographer is, the more likely it is that their books will be increasingly careful, diplomatic, rote, and, one sometimes suspects, outsourced.