Guest Movie Review: Fast & Furious 6
/The sixth installment (God help us all) of the brainless car-porn series roars into theaters
Read MoreBook Review: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember
/One of our most enjoyable science-writers turns in a reasonably hopeful prognosis for mankind's future
Read MoreBook Review: The Guns at Last Light
/A historian's great trilogy about U.S. forces at war on WWII's Western front at last comes to its finish
Read MoreBook Review: Sacred Games
/As if the tensions between Athens and Sparta at the 80th Olympiad weren't bad enough, now there's a dead Spartan - and the chief suspect is Athenian. Young everyman investigator Nico is on the case.
Read MoreGuest Movie Review: Star Trek Into Darkness
/Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the villain in the latest installment of J.J. Abrams' re-invention of "Star Trek"
Read MoreBook Review: Edmund Burke, the First Conservative
/The so-called 'father of conservatism' gets an aphoristic new biography from a very interested party.
Read MoreBook Review: All the Glittering Prizes
/The great diplomat and statesman John Hay is the subject of a riveting new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance
/A scrupulously intelligent and lavishly illustrated new book examines the enormous impact one ancient text had on the whole of the Italian Renaissance
Read MoreBook Review: The 5th Wave
/Is Rick Yancey's latest teen-targeted sci-fi thriller mere filler for fans waiting on the next "Hunger Games" volume, or is there some meat on its bones?
Read MoreBook Review: The Plantagenets
/Using castles and cunning, swords and statesmanship, guile and guts, they ruled England (and big chunks of France) for over two centuries - they were the Plantagenets, and they're the subject of a boisterous new history
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's CD of the Week - Shostakovich's 7th Symphony
/The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic brings forth a dazzling recording of Shostakovich's "Leningrad Symphony"
Read MoreBook Review: Global Crisis
/The 17th century found itself caught between widespread social upheaval and natural catastrophes unprecedented in human history - an absorbing new history looks at the entire world four centuries ago ... and of course glances at our own
Read MoreBook Review: Europe
/That long-standing hotbed of world history, Europe, gets a big new dissection by one of our most engaging historians
Read MoreBook Review: Tocqueville - The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty
/A brilliant French study of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" at last has an English translation
Read MoreBook Review: Alexander Wilson, the Scot Who Founded American Ornithology
/He was a young immigrant from Scotland who was inspired by one great man and inspired another, but in between, Alexander Wilson did the pioneering work of creating the American discipline of bird-study. A wonderful new book re-examines his legacy
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's CD of the Week - Valentin Silvestrov
/Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov's enigmatic and disturbing 'Naive Music' gets a new recording from pianist Elisaveta Blumina
Read MoreIt Might Have Been
/In life there are no second chances, no do-overs. But what if we could keep trying until we got it right? Kate Atkinson explores the possibilities in a novel that just might win her a coveted literary prize or two.
Read MoreSnobs of Extraordinary Ability
/In Andre Aciman's latest novel, a man recalls his time as a graduate student at Harvard, revisiting the early days of a long-estranged friendship.
Read MoreBalkan Zoology
/Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife was universally acclaimed by critics, but behind its beautiful writing lie some dangerously unexamined stereotypes about the Balkans. Pedja Jurisic digs beneath the mythology.
Read MoreLoud, Loud, Loud: AUDUBON!!!!
/He travelled the fledgling United States shooting birds, wiring them into poses, and then painting them for eternity - he was John James Audubon, and his epic "The Birds of America" has a beautiful, gargantuan new edition from Abbeville Press
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