If the acquiring editors have it right, Jonathan Goldsmith, the actor who played “the most interesting man in the world” in the Dos Equis beer commercials, doesn’t just play an interesting man on TV: he’s pretty interesting in real life, too. Earlier this week, Galleycat shared news that the character actor has signed with Dutton to […]
Monday June 6 If You Can Keep It by Eric Metaxas In a goofy bobblehead of Nathan Hale, created by waggish Yale alums, Metaxas discerns a disturbing symptom of a cultural disease afflicting America. Evident in the myriad ways that many Americans now ignore or deprecate all that is noble and inspiring in their country’s history, […]
Muhammad Ali inspired book after book of every kind—including Neil Liefer and Thomas Hauser’s epic Muhammad Ali, Memories, which landed him on the cover of Booklist in 1993. Here, we’ve turned to the archives to bring you 10 great titles about the Greatest for adults and young readers. The original Booklist reviews are excerpted—and linked—below. For Adults Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship […]
The June 1 & 15 issue of Booklist magazine is now live. Visit Booklist Online, where you’ll find 414 new reviews and 15 new feature articles and lists. The articles will be free to all for the next two weeks—to have unrestricted access, you’ll need to log in. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, or do subscribe […]
With the 2016 election only a year off, the current Democrat frontrunners are Hillary, Hillary, and Hillary—at least in the number of children’s books about her. Over the summer, a reporter e-mailed to ask about Hillary Clinton books aimed at kids for an article she was writing. I replied that almost all of the titles […]
A remarkable and wide-ranging study of Frank Sinatra’s second act. It would be easy to label Kaplan’s massive two-volume biography of Frank Sinatra—this second volume checks in at 992 pages, following the 786-page first installment, Frank: The Voice (2010)—as an example of massive overkill, but such an assessment would miss the mark entirely. This is not […]
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. If you’re scratching your head and saying, “Well, that’s great, but who was Ada Lovelace?”—here are some titles that will help answer that question. (For a quick take on her unconventional character, read Hannah Fry’s “Not Your Typical […]
A veteran biographer and longtime friend offers a buoyant account of a major figure in American letters. From the outset of this major life story of American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal, Parini, highly regarded novelist, poet, and biographer (John Steinbeck, 1995; Robert Frost, 1999), does not hide his friendship with the great and greatly […]
It was 60 years ago today, September 30, 1955, when James Dean drove his Porsche 550 Spyder into the driver’s side of another car (a Ford Tudor). Dean was killed instantly while the other driver walked away with a few bruises. That this very young actor, 24 when he died, remains a film icon on […]