Recent Reviews

16 May 2012 (585 words)

Travels in Tandem (Susanna Hoe)
The Writing of Women and Men Who Travelled Together

7 May 2012 (237)

Billancourt Tales (Nina Berberova)
- stories of Paris' White Russian community around 1930

27 April 2012 (374)

The Queen Against Defoe (Stefan Heym)
And Other Stories

23 April 2012 (369)

The Palace of Dreams (Ismail Kadare)
- an Ottoman bureaucracy managing dreams

19 April 2012 (332)

German Quickly (April Wilson)
A Grammar for Reading German

17 April 2012 (560)

A History of Wales (John Davies)
- a dense but rewarding narrative
The Making of Wales (John Davies)

16 April 2012 (466)

The March of the Musicians (Per Olov Enquist)
- a novel about labour unrest in Sweden's bleak north

2 April 2012 (836)

Poor Economics (Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo)
A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

29 March 2012 (390)

*All One Horse (Breyten Breytenbach)
- dream fables and surreal paintings

22 March 2012 (665)

Pakistan: A Hard Country (Anatol Lieven)
- a broad-ranging survey of its contemporary politics

19 March 2012 (380)

Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers)
- mischief and mayhem in an Oxford women's college

12 March 2012 (1048)

Portfolios of the Poor (Daryl Collins et al.)
How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day

4 March 2012 (379)

Three Generations (Yom Sang-seop)
- tensions in a bourgeois Korean family around 1930

2 March 2012 (552)

The Caucasus: An Introduction (Thomas de Waal)
- the modern history of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia

29 February 2012 (496)

*Lost Books of Medieval China (Glen Dudbridge)
- learning from the reconstruction of lost texts

18 February 2012 (484)

Love in a Fallen City (Eileen Chang)
- novellas about women in 1930s Hong Kong and Shanghai

7 February 2012 (557)

Please Look After Mom (Shin Kyung-Sook)
- the life of a Korean woman and her family

2 February 2012 (817)

One Illness Away (Anirudh Krishna)
Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty

29 January 2012 (738)

1788: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (Watkin Tench)
+ A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson

31 December 2011 (387)

German: A Linguistic Introduction (Sarah M.B. Fagan)
- language structure, history, and contemporary use

14 December 2011 (632)

*Metropole (Ferenc Karinthy)
- trapped in a crowded city with an incomprehensible language

12 December 2011 (1348)

The Long Thaw (David Archer)
How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate

9 December 2011 (257)

Oliver VII (Antal Szerb)
- a slight but charming entertainment

5 December 2011 (453)

The Elements of Graphing Data (William S. Cleveland)
- effective graphical presentation of data

28 November 2011 (1986)

**The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin)
- the great Chinese novel, aka The Dream of the Red Chamber

26 November 2011 (327)

*Savushun (Simin Daneshvar)
A Novel About Modern Iran

21 November 2011 (1579)

**Microeconomics (Samuel Bowles)
Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution

11 November 2011 (1027)

The Development of Atmospheric General Circulation Models (Donner, Schubert, Somerville)
Complexity, Synthesis and Computation

10 November 2011 (901)

The Wandering Who? (Gilad Atzmon)
A Study of Jewish Identity Politics

6 November 2011 (441)

*Population Genetics (John H. Gillespie)
A Concise Guide

30 October 2011 (1708)

Higher Speculations (Helge Kragh)
Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology

21 October 2011 (547)

*An Instance of the Fingerpost (Iain Pears)
- murder, espionage and controversy in Restoration Oxford

14 October 2011 (1220)

Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (James A. Shapiro)
- natural genetic engineering and the read-write genome

3 October 2011 (675)

Oxford (Jan Morris)
- a potpourri of information about the town and university

22 September 2011 (771)

*The Making of the British Landscape (Francis Pryor)
How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today

20 September 2011 (424)

Last Rites (Michael Hampson)
The End of the Church of England

13 September 2011 (307)

A Brief History of the Normans (François Neveux)
The Conquests that Changed the Face of Europe

22 August 2011 (1682)

Empires of the Silk Road (Christopher I. Beckwith)
A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present

19 August 2011 (226)

*Ferdydurke (Witold Gombrowicz)
- a comedy of pedagogy and identity

18 August 2011 (871)

*Schooling in Western Europe (Mary Jo Maynes)
- the introduction of mass elementary education

12 August 2011 (760)

Religions of the Silk Road (Richard Foltz)
Premodern Patterns of Globalization

9 August 2011 (364)

The Bad Book Affair (Ian Sansom)
- social comedy in a northern Ireland backwater

Full chronological listing (long)