Book review: A History of Wild Places — by Shea Ernshaw

The visceral and immediate start of this book had me in its grasp from the very start.

1619, a year that isn’t well known in the annals of American history, is the starting point for this fresh and exacting examination of the history of slavery in this country, first published in The New York Times Magazine and now expanded into a book.

When we first meet Tookie, she’s in the midst of making one of the worst decisions of her life, which is, in fact, a crime, and lands her in jail.

A National Book Award finalist this year, “Matrix” is a feat of storytelling by a master of fiction.

You know ski season is right around the corner when the ski films drop, but this year, a ski book has dropped, so let’s go, let it snow.

Romance novels, as a genre, are enjoying a resurgence — the guarantee of a happy ending can make the experience of reading one very relaxing and enjoyable in stressful times.

The third Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery, this whodunnit may be my favorite in the series.

Tamarack trees, which grow in peatland forests and also on islands of mounded peat, need 300 years to reach seven feet in height.

Jane Shoringfield is a pragmatic woman with a head for figures; she’s been keeping the accounts for her guardians, the kindly couple who took her in after the death of her parents in the recent war, but it is time for Jane to make her own way.

Anna Graham, with an unsteady marriage, a fully-grown independent daughter, and a mother recently passed, is now uncovering her past and figuring out who she is.

In the titular novella, Black children, the elderly, innocent families are forced from their homes in a wave of violence and destruction.

In 2002, Nadia Wassef, along with four business partners, one of them her sister, opened Diwan Bookstore in Cairo, Egypt, the flagship store of what was to become, and is, a successful chain of bookstores and the leading seller of English and Arabic books … (read more)

This is the Harlem of the 1960s, crucible of the Civil Rights Movement.

When astrobiologist Theo Byrne loses his wife, the center of his universe, he is left, seemingly without the proper tools in his arsenal, to single-parent Robin, the child named after his mother’s favorite bird.

(W. W. Norton & Company)When astrobiologist Theo Byrne loses his wife, the center of his universe, he is left, seemingly without the proper tools in his arsenal, to single-parent Robin, the child named after his mother’s favorite bird. Robin is “sensitive … (read more)