Recent Reviews

9 February 2010 (605 words)

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

31 January 2010 (339)

Map Addict (Mike Parker)
A Tale of Obsession, Fudge and the Ordnance Survey

16 January 2010 (572)

Eurasian Crossroads (James A. Millward)
A History of Xinjiang

3 January 2010 (226)

Wonder (Hugo Claus)
- collaboration and confusion in post-war Flanders

1 January 2010 (200)

Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia (Jan Mrazek)
New Approaches to Performance Events

31 December 2009 (329)

Under the Volcano (Cameron Forbes)
The Story of Bali

21 December 2009 (349)

Harvest of the Suburbs (Andrea Gaynor)
An Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities

15 December 2009 (179)

Angkor (Dawn Rooney)
Cambodia's Wondrous Khmer Temples

13 December 2009 (418)

The Myth of the Holy Cow (D.N. Jha)
- the origins of cow veneration and vegetarianism in India

5 December 2009 (408)

Works Along the Way (Gisli Sigurdsson)
- notable Icelandic architecture in concrete

3 December 2009 (262)

*Angkor (Michael D. Coe)
And the Khmer Civilization

2 December 2009 (451)

*The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat)
- "there are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude"

27 November 2009 (172)

River of Time (Jon Swain)
- a memoir of Cambodia and Vietnam at war

4 November 2009 (377)

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

Full chronological listing (long)