All Book Reviews
Can ‘emotional outsourcing’ fix failing romantic relationships?A summer beach read with humor and depth, “The Fixer Upper” asks, “What if women could outsource the emotional burden of ‘fixing’ their partners?”
The dedicated women behind the world’s first general-purpose computerKathy Kleiman writes a lively tribute to the female mathematicians who calculated ballistics trajectories for the U.S. military during World War II.
The best thing since Babe Ruth? How Shohei Ohtani is making history.Babe Ruth was renowned for both his hitting and pitching. Now, young baseball phenom Shohei Ohtani from Japan is following in the Babe’s footsteps.
A modern-day Huck Finn travels the Mississippi on a flatboatNo one thought journalist Rinker Buck would succeed in taking a flatboat from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. He proves them wrong in “Life on the Mississippi.”
Where the Nile began: The perilous journey to seek the river’s sourceAn expedition to discover the Nile River’s origin was the “Holy Grail” of 19th-century exploration, as Candice Millard’s “River of the Gods” shows.
Mohsin Hamid’s novel ‘The Last White Man’ imagines a post-racial worldBritish Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid explores a provocative question: Can white supremacy persist, if no one is white any longer?
Survival tale ‘The Wall’ pits a woman against strange forcesAustrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s survival novel tells the story of a woman trapped behind a strange, impenetrable wall in a Bavarian forest.
How ‘Bull Durham’ went from long shot to movie classicDirector Ron Shelton’s “The Church of Baseball” tells the story behind his most famous film – one of the most popular sports movies of all time.
Singer, dancer, pilot, spy: Josephine Baker’s wartime careerFame gave Josephine Baker a cover for espionage during World War II, when her frequent tours enabled her to smuggle secrets out of occupied France.
Friendship tested, lives transformed in sublime novel ‘Fellowship Point’Coastal Maine provides the setting for “Fellowship Point,” Alice Elliott Dark’s resplendent novel about caring for the places we love.
The heyday of shopping malls is gone, but far from forgottenShopping malls, the once-gleaming symbols of suburban American prosperity, are ripe for reinvention and reuse, writes an architecture critic.
From the particular to the universal: Cross-cultural stories“A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times” by Ethiopian American writer Meron Hadero highlights immigrant stories of dislocation and identity.
The fall of Tyrannosaurus rex and the rise of mammals on EarthTyrannosaurus bones help piece together the story of dinosaurs’ demise, while mammals emerged and adapted, in two outstanding natural history books.
Black Native Americans were largely erased from US history“We Refuse to Forget” explores the situation of Black members of the Creek Nation in the 1800s, and their descendants in the 20th century.
No one was telling the stories of rural women. So she did.Spanish veterinarian and poet María Sánchez honors rural women in her community, and their counterparts around the world, in “Land of Women.”
‘When Women Were Dragons’ imagines a fiery response to female suppressionIn an age of conformism, 700,000 women transform into fiery beasts, in Kelly Barnhill’s fantastical novel, “When Women Were Dragons.”
‘Horse’ unfolds a riveting tale of a champion thoroughbred and his enslaved trainer“Horse,” by Geraldine Brooks, melds a historic tale of an enslaved Black horse trainer with a modern-day story of interracial romance.
Doing what comes naturally: The elegance and danger of hawksIn “The Hawk’s Way,” Sy Montgomery comes to love birds of prey, admiring their fierce intelligence and witnessing their predatory instincts.
She coached soccer for refugee children. Then she started schools for them.Soccer coach and humanitarian Luma Mufleh describes her efforts on behalf of refugee children in the United States in her memoir, “Learning America.”
Façades are dropped and judgments suspended on a commuter trainOn the 8:05 to London, commuters ignore each other. Until an incident brings them together in Clare Pooley’s “Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting.”
