The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene. W. W. Norton, 2021. Hardcover, xvi + 591 pp., $40. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz Jean-Paul Sartre once classified Gustave Flaubert as a “singular universal.” For Sartre, such a writer’s oeuvre becomes a...
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 928 pages, $40. Reviewed by James Baresel Few nineteenth-century statesman are as famed for their positive contributions to Europe’s practical politics as...
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder. Norton, 2020. Hardcover, 464 pages, $32. Reviewed by Margot Enns In a key scene in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Cal, the darker, moodier brother, blackmails his brother, Aron, to keep quiet about Cal’s...
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30. Reviewed by Kyle Sammin In the American Revolution, Enlightenment principles, natural rights, and the traditions of English...
Uncrowned Queen: The Life of Margaret Beaufort, Mother of the Tudors By Nicola Tallis. Basic Books, 2020. Hardcover, 416 pages, $32. Reviewed by Garrett Robinson The Tudors, unfortunately famous now primarily through film and pulp-histories, have a name for themselves...
Summer is here and the days are long. Slowing schedules allow time for many of us to sink into the queue of books that have been patiently waiting for us over the busyness of our end of spring schedules.