en-US Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:08:53 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9113841931 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:08:53 -0800 /review/show/7352461976 Steve is currently reading Conan the Magnificent by Robert Jordan
]]> Review6787625811 Sat, 24 Aug 2024 14:23:18 -0700 /review/show/6787625811 Steve has read Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (Kindle Edition) by Katherine Bucknell
bookshelves: 2024-books
A densely-packed and wonderfully readable new biography of Isherwood, surely the book destined to be the definitive life of the man (and the men in his life). My full review is here:
]]> Review6486036772 Mon, 06 May 2024 16:39:03 -0700 /review/show/6486036772 Steve has read Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (Hardcover) by Alexander Larman
bookshelves: 2024-books
A breathless, cliched, and often ridiculous look at the final years of King George VI. The author has done some research, but he when he got to his writing table, he ended up preferring gossip, salacious footnotes, and bombastic nonsense over any kind of sober analysis. Readers who want a Royals biography to love the queen and dish the dirt will eat this up - but there's not much more here. My review: ]]> Review6302630285 Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:57:38 -0800 /review/show/6302630285 Steve has read Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe (Hardcover) by Chris Laoutaris
bookshelves: 2024-books
This Shakespeare book - big, generous, quite readable - examines the effects Lady Elizabeth Russell may or may not have had on the world of Shakespeare's theater, and it's very good on both the lady and the theater parts of the story, even Shakespeare himself, as always, continues to be elusive. My review here: ]]> Review6302615247 Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:49:58 -0800 /review/show/6302615247 Steve has read Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (Kindle Edition) by Linda Leavell
bookshelves: 2024-books
Reading the poems of the great Marianne Moore, or her letters, or just bumping into snippets of her antics and the odd, larger-than-life persona she took on in her later years will most almost any readers wish there were a big, definitive biography -- and there is, this one! My full review here: ]]> Review6302587320 Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:38:04 -0800 /review/show/6302587320 Steve has read The Blue Book (Hardcover) by A.L. Kennedy
bookshelves: 2024-books
It's always frustrating when first-rate prose-crafting skills are enlisted to unworthy ends, and even worse when the raw material of a good novel is emblobbed all over with the posturings and gimmicks of arid postmodern game-playing, and that certainly happens here. My full review: ]]> Review6240677190 Tue, 06 Feb 2024 09:41:29 -0800 /review/show/6240677190 Steve has read Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short) by Dennis Yi Tenen
bookshelves: 2024-books
Former Microsoft wonk Dennis Yi Tenen here whips up an entry for the "Norton Shorts" series about all the things artificial intelligence likes to do in its spare time, the things it dreams about, the kinds of stuff it likes to read - all the kinds of exaggerations, wild overstatements, and low-rent science fiction that responsible tech-specialists spend lots of time correcting or tamping down. It certainly makes for entertaining reading. My review is here:
]]> Review6232666955 Sat, 03 Feb 2024 17:37:26 -0800 /review/show/6232666955 Steve has read Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham (Hardcover) by Deborah Jowitt
bookshelves: 2024-books
A doubtless unfair but probably inevitable litmus test for any biography of pioneering choreographer Martha Graham is fairly simple: can the biographer make Graham's world very specific art form comprehensible and interesting to the uninitiated? When it comes to modern dance, I'm about as uninitiated as it's possible to be, and thanks to the writing skills of Deborah Jowitt, I not only found this biography fascinating but I felt warmly, intelligently instructed in what exactly made Graham a great figure in the history of dance. My full review is here:

]]> Review6226796557 Thu, 01 Feb 2024 17:28:03 -0800 /review/show/6226796557 Steve has read A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City (Hardcover) by Kristin Love Huffman
bookshelves: 2024-books
In 1500, artist Jacopo de' Barbari produced a massive woodcut print of the city of Venice - not the over-generalized and detail-free like most city-prints were in the era, but remarkably detailed right down to little side canals and recognizable buildings. It was a big, expensive luxury item at the time but also an invaluable historical resource now, and this volume from Duke University Press opens with large fold-out map of the View itself and follows that up with a dozen scholarly papers on all aspects of the print and the Venice it represents. Such a treat for fans of both history and Venice! My review is here: ]]> Review6224069909 Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:17:40 -0800 /review/show/6224069909 Steve has read The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer: The True Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Hardcover) by Thom Hatch
bookshelves: 2015-new
This slim book covers all the famous highlights of the Custer story in order to build to a controversial, unconventional assessment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but his shocking conclusions were common a century ago. There's lively writing, but not all the lively writing in the world can exonerate poor "Armstrong." My full review here: ]]>