Recent Reviews

28 August 2010 (849 words)

*Switzerland: A Village History (David Birmingham)
- the mountain commune of Chateau d'Oex

27 August 2010 (1267)

The World Beyond the Hill (Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin)
Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

20 August 2010 (242)

Lords of Finance (Liaquat Ahamed)
1929, the Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke the World

28 July 2010 (409)

Mandarins (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)
- fifteen from "the father of the Japanese short story"

26 July 2010 (516)

Fearless Symmetry (Avner Ash, Robert Gross)
Exposing the Hidden Patterns of Numbers

25 July 2010 (1017)

Why Switzerland? (Jonathan Steinberg)
- history, politics, language, wealth, religion + identity

16 July 2010 (281)

Portrait of a Turkish Family (Irfan Orga)
- a childhood at the end of the Ottoman empire

2 July 2010 (538)

Bridges (David Blockley)
The Science and Art of the World's Most Inspiring Structures

20 June 2010 (217)

Deep Waters (Barbara Nadel)
- an Inspector Ikmen mystery, set in Istanbul

13 June 2010 (501)

The Spirit Level (Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett)
Why Equality is Better for Everyone

10 June 2010 (280)

Tranquility (Attila Bartis)
- a disturbed Hungarian family

7 June 2010 (257)

Turkish Reflections (Mary Lee Settle)
A Biography of a Place

13 May 2010 (669)

*Israel's History and the History of Israel (Mario Liverani)
- ancient histories, normal and invented

11 May 2010 (934)

*The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Charles Kurzman)
- a synthesis of social history and sociology

3 May 2010 (998)

Ships and Science (Larrie D. Ferreiro)
The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600-1800

2 May 2010 (608)

Financial Calculus (Martin Baxter, Andrew Rennie)
An Introduction to Derivative Pricing

29 April 2010 (106)

The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (Lawrence Block)
- Bernie Rhodenbarr steals a coin and solves a murder

25 April 2010 (581)

**The Stalin Organ (Gert Ledig)
- a novel of the Russian Front in the Second World War

24 April 2010 (195)

Doctored Evidence (Donna Leon)
- set in Venice, an Inspector Brunetti novel

18 April 2010 (342)

To the Slaughterhouse (Jean Giono)
- a Provençal village in the Great War

16 April 2010 (394)

Broken Promises (Igal Sarna)
Israeli Lives

12 April 2010 (205)

*The Leopard (Giuseppe di Lampedusa)
- a Sicilian aristocrat faces change in 1860

7 April 2010 (316)

The Siege (Ismail Kadare)
- a novel about an Ottoman army attacking an Albanian fortress

1 April 2010 (497)

The Regency Underworld (Donald A. Low)
- the dark side of London, 1800-1830

29 March 2010 (366)

The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan (David Hinton)
- nature poetry by the great Tang poet

28 March 2010 (504)

The New Turkey (Chris Morris)
The Quiet Revolution on the Edge of Europe

21 March 2010 (221)

Empires, Nations and Wars (Michael Howard)
- lectures and essays on political and military history

17 March 2010 (287)

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Michael Chabon)
- alternative history mystery in a Jewish state in Alaska

8 March 2010 (204)

The Oxford Murders (Guillermo Martinez)
- a serial killer with a mathematical bent

4 March 2010 (197)

Troubled Waters (Sarah Lazarus)
The Changing Fortunes of Whales and Dolphins

17 February 2010 (540)

Midnight Convoy and Other Stories (S. Yizhar)
- alfalfa, the 1948 war, and childhood inspiration

16 February 2010 (726)

Vietnam 1946 (Stein Tønnesson)
How the War Began

16 February 2010 (658)

Trick or Treatment? (Simon Singh, Edzard Ernst)
Alternative Medicine on Trial

16 February 2010 (403)

The Rest is Noise (Alex Ross)
Listening to the Twentieth Century

16 February 2010 (759)

The (Mis)behavior of Markets (Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson)
A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward

14 February 2010 (332)

Vietnam (David Chanoff, Doan Van Toai)
A Portrait of its People at War

13 February 2010 (162)

A Case of Two Cities (Qiu Xiaolong)
An Inspector Chen Mystery

12 February 2010 (269)

A Corner of a Foreign Field (Fiona Waters)
The Illustrated Poetry of the First World War

11 February 2010 (291)

The Turkish Embassy Letters (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)
- an aristocratic Englishwoman visits Ottoman Turkey

10 February 2010 (187)

The Murder Farm (Andrea Maria Schenkel)
- a brutal murder in post-war Germany

9 February 2010 (610)

Fireflies, Honey, and Silk (Gilbert Waldbauer)
- human uses of insects

4 February 2010 (312)

Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (David Kynaston)
- a social history of post-war Britain

Full chronological listing (long)