Recent Reviews

11 December 2024 (225 words)

Korea: A New History of South and North (Cha, Pardo)
- from political divergence to possible futures

11 December 2024 (130)

Happy Stories, Mostly (Norman Erikson Pasaribu)
- young, gay Batak students and their mothers

8 November 2024 (757)

Traffication (Paul F. Donald)
How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It

14 September 2024 (603)

Copenhagenize (Mikael Colville-Andersen)
The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism

19 August 2024 (273)

France in the World: A New Global History (Boucheron, Gerson)
- 130 short specialist essays

10 July 2024 (150)

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over (Anne de Marcken)
- a "zombie perspective" post-apocalypse novel

13 May 2024 (455)

Religion in India: A Historical Introduction (Fred W. Clothey)
- straightforward and accessible
The Hindus: An Alternative History (Wendy Doniger)
- down-to-earth and magisterial

1 April 2024 (183)

The Pastor (Hanne Ørstavik)
- finding herself in far-northern Norway

18 March 2024 (529)

Going to Church in Medieval England (Nicholas Orme)
- parish churches: people, practices, paraphernalia, ...

12 February 2024 (597)

The Indus (Andrew Robinson)
- a mysterious "lost" civilisation

12 November 2023 (199)

Insurrecto (Gina Apostol)
- metafiction and massacre: scripting the Philippines

9 November 2023 (241)

The Matter of Everything: A History of Discovery (Suzie Sheehy)
- from Röntgen to the Large Hadron Collider

1 October 2023 (129)

*When I Sing, Mountains Dance (Irene Sola)
- renewal and compassion after violence in the Catalan Pyrenees

19 September 2023 (187)

Scots & Catalans (J.H. Elliott)
- a history of two nations within states

3 July 2023 (517)

Before Religion (Brent Nongbri)
A History of a Modern Concept

19 June 2023 (175)

Women Dreaming (Salma)
- a divorce in a poor Muslim village in Tamil Nadu

30 March 2023 (515)

Edible Insects and Human Evolution (Julie J. Lesink)
- ethnography, primatology, paleontology, nutrition, ...

23 March 2023 (334)

Cycling for Sustainable Cities (Ralph Buehler, John Pucher)
The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure (Peter Cox, Till Koglin)
Spaces and (In)Equality

24 February 2023 (114)

Dear Reader (Paul Fournel)
- an old-fashioned publisher faces change

9 February 2023 (477)

Emergent Tokyo (Jorge Almazan)
- yokochō alleyways, zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, ankyo streets + dense low-rise neighbourhoods

6 January 2023 (368)

In the City of Bikes (Pete Jordan)
The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist

4 January 2023 (153)

Still Born (Guadalupe Nettel)
- a novel of many motherhoods

7 December 2022 (438)

About Our Schools: Improving on Previous Best (Brighouse, Waters)
- the past, present and future of the English school system

26 November 2022 (351)

The Golden Rhinoceros (François-Xavier Fauvelle)
Histories of the African Middle Ages

1 November 2022 (288)

Bolt From the Blue (Jeremy Cooper)
- an epistolary novel of London's avant-garde art scene

25 October 2022 (591)

Empires of the Word (Nicholas Ostler)
A Language History of the World

15 September 2022 (242)

Three Apples Fell from the Sky (Narine Abgaryan)
- life revives in an Armenian mountain village

1 September 2022 (635)

In Praise of Walking (Shane O'Mara)
The New Science of How We Walk and Why It's Good for Us

8 August 2022 (157)

Surreal Numbers (D.E. Knuth)
- a lightly dramatised exploration

6 July 2022 (451)

Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City (Geert Mak)
- from polders to provocations

27 June 2022 (405)

How Dead Languages Work (Coulter H. George)
- a linguistic, historical + literary potpourri covering six languages

25 May 2022 (714)

**The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Camilla Townsend)
- using indigenous Nahuatl sources

26 April 2022 (280)

The Road to Middle-Earth (Tom Shippey)
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Tom Shippey)

5 April 2022 (365)

*Atlas of the Invisible (James Cheshire, Oliver Uberti)
Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World

3 March 2022 (234)

The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Hiro Arikawa)
- a road-trip around Japan with a cat

8 February 2022 (717)

Fire and Ice (Natalie Starkey)
The Volcanoes of the Solar System

26 January 2022 (205)

Autumn Rounds (Jacques Poulin)
- an exceptionally gentle novel, a quiet romance

3 January 2022 (299)

Tomb of Sand (Geetanjali Shree)
- from family comedy to the politics of partition

17 December 2021 (309)

The Pursuit of Italy (David Gilmour)
A History of a Land, Its Regions and Their Peoples

15 November 2021 (268)

*Manaschi (Hamid Ismailov)
- a Kyrgyz story, modern and traditional

18 October 2021 (401)

Britain Begins (Barry Cunliffe)
- from the Ice Age to the Norman Conquest

3 September 2021 (318)

**Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics (Joel David Hamkins)
- from numbers and rigor to incompleteness and set theory

Full chronological listing (long)