Category: Nonfiction

I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press’s blog, and I was immediately won over by the old map and by that first paragraph. The book as a whole is pleasing, but not quite as pleasing as that first paragraph made me hope it would be. It’s a very well-produced book,…

Each chapter in this memoir felt perfectly paced, and pleasingly varied: family history, personal history, untangling the past, details of daily life in Ireland and England: Earl Grey and lemon cake at tea, conversations in Dublin pubs with poets. What O’Faolain writes about men and women (about patriarchy, about the rise of feminism) is interesting…

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s prose is wonderfully precise: it seems like each word has been carefully chosen from a rich and expansive vocabulary, and the result is a collection of essays where the tone of each seems perfectly suited to its subject matter. There are shepherds and monks, mountain-top monasteries and bus rides in the middle…

This book, subtitled “Journeys in India,” is a series of clever and chatty vignettes about Indian culture and life on the Indian subcontinent. Dimock is at his best telling funny stories: the one about the monkey who gets into the house and amuses itself at Dimock’s wife’s dressing table; the one about the difficulties of…

After a discussion of translation and what a translator might or might not betray (the original words, the original language, the original author, the language being translated into, etc), Rabassa launches into his own career as a translator of books from the spanish and portuguese. His wit and word-play are pleasing, as are his discussions…

Essays about place and memory and imagination and language, all-around pleasing, from the descriptions of New York, of Minnesota, of Norway to stories of word and wordplay. I suspect I would have enjoyed the longer essays on Henry James and Charles Dickens more if I’d read either of the works that are discussed the most…

Ireland by bicycle: wet weather, bogs, castles, ruins, roadside shrines, Guinness, et cetera. I appreciated the passages quoted from older guidebooks (and was charmed by the idea of Newby lugging books from 1912 around Ireland on a bicycle in 1985), but much of the history seemed too just-barely touched-upon; I felt like I would have…

Light and water, the Eiffel Tower being built, Cliff House before the fire. So much detail: a carved ivory elephant resting on piano keys, narrow wooden bridges, the light in rooms across oceans. This book is gorgeous: a collection of well-chosen images, pictures to make you pause. (And to make you want to rummage through…

Calotypes, daguerrotypes, old city streets and buildings just the same or long disappeared. The lettering on the advertisements: “Maravilla cocoa,” “India rubber & vulcanite works,” a sign for a wigmaker, est. 1760. Gaslights and the working waterfront, bridges being built across the Thames. Somerset house, the basement at the water’s very edge. The dome of…

A fine brief overview of London history, though lacking in the kind of detailed and personal description that I enjoy in city-books like H.V. Morton’s. Also, I rather disagree with Mr. Wilson on the subject of modern and contemporary art, so at the end of the book, I was left rolling my eyes at his…