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1 month ago | 
openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue
Plato and the Tyrant:The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic MasterpieceBy James RommWW Norton 2025For about twenty years in the 4th century BC, the Athenian philosopher Plato visited the royal court of Syracuse, mainly as intellectual ornament to the tyrant Dionysius II and mentor-guest to the tyrant’s uncle Dion.
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1 month ago | 
openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue
The Buried City: Unearthing the Real PompeiiBy Gabriel ZuchtriegelTranslated from the German by Jamie BullochThe University of Chicago Press 2025New from the University of Chicago Press is Jamie Bulloch’s English-language translation of the 2023 book Gabriel Zuchtriegel wrote about his experiences as Director of the Pompeii Archeological Park.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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?
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month ago | 
openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue
Horace: Poet on a VolcanoBy Peter StothardYale University Press 2025The Ancient Lives series from Yale University Press continues with Horace: Poet on a Volcano by classicist and former Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard. Some of the subjects taken up by the series have been more obscure than others (Demetrius, Phocion, etc.), but Stothard’s subject, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was for 2000 years the exact opposite: not just known but beloved, not just familiar but family.
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1 month ago | 
vineyardgazette.com | Steve Donoghue
Such a Good Mom by Julia Spiro, Minotaur Books, $28, 294 pgs. Julia Spiro’s third novel, Such a Good Mom, opens on deceptively conventional grounds. A woman named Brynn Nelson has returned to her childhood home of Martha’s Vineyard, and there she’s facing several personal problems at once.
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1 month ago | 
openlettersreview.com | Steve Donoghue
The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain, 1815-1945By N. A. M. RodgerWW Norton 2025Naval historian N. A. M. Rodger begins his new book, the long-awaited concluding volume in his naval history of Britain, by directly noticing the ‘long-awaited’ part. The first volume, The Safeguard of the Sea, appeared in 1997, and the second, The Command of the Ocean, appeared in 2004, and twenty years is a long time to wait for this final volume, The Price of Victory.
