Recent Reviews

4 November 2009 (377 words)

Under the Heel of the Dragon (Blaine Kaltman)
Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China

31 October 2009 (334)

Birth of the Chess Queen (Marilyn Yalom)
- powerful women and chess in medieval Europe

26 October 2009 (612)

Vietnam: A Natural History (Sterling, Hurley, Minh)
- biogeography, flora and fauna, and conservation

21 October 2009 (173)

Q.E.D. (Burkard Polster)
Beauty in Mathematical Proof

14 October 2009 (592)

Japan to 1600 (William Wayne Farris)
A Social and Economic History

4 October 2009 (301)

Bartleby & Co. (Enrique Vila-Matas)
- writers who "prefer not to"

1 October 2009 (486)

Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (Mahmoud Darwish)
- "the premier poetic voice of the Palestinian people"

28 September 2009 (793)

The Story of French (Jean-Benoît Nadeau, Julie Barlow)
From Charlemagne to The Cirque du Soleil

20 September 2009 (379)

The Real Oliver Twist (John Waller)
Robert Blincoe: A Life That Illuminates a Violent Age

12 September 2009 (702)

Martyrdom in Islam (David Cook)
- from its genesis to modern radicals

30 August 2009 (242)

Little Man, What Now? (Hans Fallada)
- struggling to survive in Germany in the Great Depression

26 August 2009 (210)

Plants Don't Drink Coffee (Unai Elorriaga)
- intertwined stories about insects, rugby, love + carpentry

23 August 2009 (692)

Dirt (David R. Montgomery)
The Erosion of Civilizations

12 August 2009 (719)

*A Little Primer of Tu Fu (David Hawkes)
- an introduction to classical Chinese poetry

22 July 2009 (470)

MediaWiki (Daniel J. Barrett)
Wikipedia and Beyond

16 July 2009 (247)

Tolkien's Gown (Rick Gekoski)
And Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books

10 July 2009 (354)

*Khirbet Khizeh (S. Yizhar)
- evicting a Palestinian village in 1948

5 July 2009 (246)

Bones, Rocks and Stars (Chris Turney)
The Science of When Things Happened

2 July 2009 (216)

Women in a River Landscape (Heinrich Böll)
A Novel in Dialogues and Soliloquies

22 June 2009 (130)

Hammerklavier (Yasmina Reza)
- a pointillist rumination on music, mortality and memory

21 June 2009 (863)

*The Last Imaginary Place (Robert McGhee)
A Human History of the Arctic World

12 June 2009 (564)

Proust and the Squid (Maryanne Wolf)
The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

7 June 2009 (318)

Faded Portraits (E. Breton de Nijs)
A Novel of the Indies

27 May 2009 (656)

Dangerous Sanctuaries (Sarah Kenyon Lischer)
Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid

24 May 2009 (245)

Women Without Men (Shahrnush Parsipur)
A Novel of Modern Iran

18 May 2009 (397)

Throwim Way Leg (Tim Flannery)
- a biologist's adventures in the New Guinea highlands

10 May 2009 (374)

The Social Amoebae (John Tyler Bonner)
The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds

29 April 2009 (180)

Guilt about the Past (Bernhard Schlink)
- the post-war German experience

26 April 2009 (525)

The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
A Chronicle of the 19th Century

23 April 2009 (343)

The Middle Path (Eric Lambin)
Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe

10 April 2009 (585)

Bills of Rights in Australia (Byrnes, Charlesworth, McKinnon)
History, Politics and Law

5 April 2009 (767)

*Medieval Islamic Medicine (Peter E. Pormann, Emilie Savage-Smith)
- origins, theory, practice, social context

29 March 2009 (893)

Snake Oil Science (R. Barker Bausell)
The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine

24 March 2009 (619)

Mirror of the Indies (Rob Nieuwenhuys)
A History of Dutch Colonial Literature

21 March 2009 (401)

The Photographs of Baldwin Spencer (Allen, Batty, Morton)
- Aboriginal photographs from 1894 to 1923

5 March 2009 (1119)

**Debunking Economics (Steve Keen)
The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences

4 March 2009 (458)

Epidemics Laid Low (Patrice Bourdelais)
- a history of public health responses in Western Europe

25 February 2009 (232)

*Black Parrot, Green Crow (Houshang Golshiri)
- short stories from modern Iran

19 February 2009 (571)

The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The Impact of the Highly Improbable

13 February 2009 (937)

Charles Darwin (Janet Browne)
Voyaging; The Power of Place

11 February 2009 (546)

DNA, Words and Models (Robin, Rodolphe, Schbath)
Statistics of Exceptional Words

27 January 2009 (869)

*A Natural History of Conifers (Aljos Farjon)
- evolution, systematics, biogeography, ecology, conservation

Full chronological listing (long)