
Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009
Polly Curry is the first to acknowledge that she's an unlikely first-time author. For starters, she's 96 years old and it took her more than 30 years to write her book.
Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of The Washington Times, is celebrating his 90th birthday this year. The year also marks the release of his autobiography, "As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen," published by The Washington Times Foundation. A best-seller in his native Korea, the book, now translated into English, gives Western readers an opportunity to learn more about a man whose deeds and goals have been the subject of international attention for decades.
Close look at an enduring textbook
Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009
Well over a century before neurosurgeon Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd was wrestling with life-and-death consequences at the fictive Seattle Grace, the very real British anatomist, pathologist and surgeon Henry Gray was taking advantage of a new abundance of fresh corpses and an interested publisher to complete his iconic human anatomy textbook commonly known as "Gray's Anatomy."
Sunday, Jan. 18, 2009
In "Snark," David Denby takes on what he calls "a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation - a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid world of print, television, radio and the Internet."
Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008
In "Sea of Poppies," the aspirations of 19th-century British colonizers, native cultural imperatives and business realities compete and move the book's tumultuous tapestry of a story forward.
Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008
Now the witches have grown old. They are widowed and fussy and plagued by the same illnesses and dread that afflict mere mortals. Do we like them? Yes. Are we pleased to find them in a sequel? Absolutely.
Sunday, Oct. 19, 2008
In times when the virtue of fiscal restraint can be in no doubt, there is something curiously gratifying about contemplating the alternative — in this case, Faberge's eggs. The appearance of the first of these extravagant, bejeweled objects at the Russian royal court and others that followed are the subject of Toby Faber's riveting social history "Faberge's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire."
Sunday, Sept. 28, 2008
Talk of meltdowns and bailouts and bouncing stock market numbers are making mathematicians of us all. Not necessarily good mathematicians, but numbers in the news have a way of resonating with even the most word-bound.
Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008
One cannot see the title of Carlos Fuentes' new short story collection and not think of Leo Tolstoy. However, while "Happy Families" takes as its epigraph the immortal first line from "Anna Karenina" - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" - it could be argued that few of the families featured in Mr. Fuentes' 16 stories are unequivocally happy and, of those, no two are really alike.
Sunday, Aug. 3, 2008
Noted social critic Herbert London opens his latest book with a simple statement