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The Lost City of Z

Percy Harrison Fawcett was utterly convinced that there was evidence hidden in the Amazon jungle of an ancient civilization. He had found shards of pottery and rock paintings, he had spoken to Indians...

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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the breathtakingly wonderful Diary of Samuel Pepys, a reading experience that left me feeling that I had encountered the mind of a cheerful, original, and impossibly open...

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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Daniel Mendelsohn had always been interested in his own family’s genealogy, even when he was a child. As an adult, he eagerly gathered information and stories: the branch of the family that went to...

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The Sisters of Sinai

You may have an image of the Victorian age as a world of stuffiness, prudishness, and repression (though not if you’ve read any Wilkie Collins!) But it was also an age of exploration and discovery: up...

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The Lunar Men

“In the eighteenth century clubs are everywhere,” says Jenny Uglow, “clubs for singing, clubs for drinking, clubs for farting; clubs of poets and pudding-makers and politicians.” This marvelous book is...

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Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings

I grew up reading the Anne of Green Gables series. I read the first one when I was about eight, and then read them over and over: Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne of...

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Jane Austen

A few years ago, I was on a three-week-long hiking trip with students, doing a portion of the pilgrimage trail of St. James of Compostella. We had to pack light, as you can imagine: we would rue any...

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Young Romantics

There is, I think, a myth about creative genius that it takes place in solitary glory. Picture an author, writing. Picture Hemingway, or Wordsworth, or Shakespeare; picture George Eliot or Mary Oliver...

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The Hare With Amber Eyes

I read Edmund De Waal’s family biography after seeing a rave review of it over at Eve’s Alexandria. Victoria loved this book about the Ephrussi family’s generations-long ownership of 264 Japanese...

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A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

When you think of the great 19th-century explorers of Africa, what names spring to mind? Livingston, Stanley, and Burton, sure. Speke, Denham, and Baker, if you’ve done your reading. But Heinrich...

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How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at...

I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve posted! I’ve been teaching January Term at my university, and it’s an intense class: three hours a day every day, plus all the concomitant prepping and...

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The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

At age 30, the poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide, leaving behind two children, a husband from whom she’d separated, and a body of work that he would be left to guard, along with both their...

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Louisa May Alcott

I’ve posted here before that the book I’ve re-read most in my life is probably Little Women. I started reading it when I was about ten or eleven, and I’ve read it over and over since then,...

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Elizabeth and Hazel

David Margolick’s book, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, revolves around the by-now iconic civil rights photograph of two fifteen-year-old girls:           This photo, taken by journalist...

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One Art: Letters

Years ago, I bought a copy of One Art: Letters for my husband. How many years? I’m not sure: it came out in 1994, but it was probably not quite so long ago as that. Ten years ago? Twelve? Anyway, he...

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Thomas Hardy

I was irrationally worried when I started reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy. You see, Hardy is my favorite writer, and I didn’t want to find out he was terrible, that he kicked puppies...

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The Darkest Jungle

In Todd Balf’s book The Darkest Jungle, he explains that by 1854, after the spectacular and expensive failure of the Franklin expedition, the search for the Northwest Passage was sliding off the front...

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Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist

As some readers here may know, I am a huge fan of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of seafaring novels. When I was in college, my father introduced me to them, and after one false start (it took...

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The Silent Woman

I started Janet Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman in the belief that it was a biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I’ve never read much Plath — just the most-anthologized poems — and even less...

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Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

I didn’t think it was possible for me to shed tears over a biography, but by the time I got to the end of Ruth Franklin’s book about Shirley Jackson, I was so attached to Jackson that reading about her...

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