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| When the monasteries in England were dissolved under Henry VIII, Richard Ovenden notes, “tens of thousands of books were burned or broken up and sold as scrap.” This led Sir Thomas Bodley to found the Oxford library that Francis Bacon would call “an ark to save learning from the deluge.” These days Mr. Ovenden is the Bodleian Library’s chief librarian; his “Burning the Books” is concerned with striking episodes of knowledge destruction over the centuries. Sometimes the tragedy is intentional, as with the destruction of an estimated 100 million “Jewish” books during the Holocaust. But just as often knowledge disappears through neglect. Even in these digital days, a broken link or a national firewall may suddenly make a new idea or a precious bit of history inaccessible. “Burning the Books” is a timely reminder and a tribute to those who have fought diligently to protect the works of the past. Read the review —C.C.
Books Editor
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| The Crucible: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it,” Robert E. Lee reportedly remarked as he witnessed the carnage of Fredericksburg, a battle that left Southerners exuberant and Lincoln tormented. Fredericksburg was a time and place of lasting transformation. The idealism of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was tempered; Louisa May Alcott’s volunteer work fed her fiction to come. And Walt Whitman arrived from Brooklyn, in search of his injured brother, to find himself called to stay and bind the wounds of many. David S. Reynolds on “A Worse Place Than Hell” by John Matteson. Read the review |
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| “Sylvie”: A graphic-novel memoir of girlhood and artistic coming-of-age offers young readers encouragement in their own moments of travail and independence. Read the review |
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| | | |  | | A Shot in the Moonlight
By Ben Montgomery Besieged by a racist gang in their Kentucky home one night in 1897, George and Mollie Dinning feared they’d lose their farm—and lives. George fought back with a gun, and then in court. He found an unlikely ally in a onetime Confederate soldier. Read the review |
 | | The Rope
By Alex Tresniowski A black man doing odd jobs made an easy target when a sensational crime gripped Asbury Park, N.J., in 1910: A 10-year-old white girl had gone missing while walking home from school. Meanwhile, a dogged sleuth pursued the real murderer. Read the review |
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| “Monkey King”: An abridged edition of “Journey to the West,” one of the Four Great Classics of Chinese literature, is a rollicking work of high buffoonery. Read the review |
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| Love Is Unkind: The Roman goddess Venus, like her Greek counterpart, Aphrodite, was far more than just a love goddess. Aphrodite was a deity of fierce and violent sexuality, the forceful tamer of men and beasts, the mother (by her lover Ares) of the lesser gods Dread and Fear. She presided over Greek civic magistrates, the unity of the citizen body, safe travel by sea, and military leadership, not to mention the battle-rage of Greek warriors. Scholars have searched for a common thread to link all the different aspects of her portfolio. Peter Thonemann on “Venus and Aphrodite” by Bettany Hughes. Read the review |
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| “The Witch’s Heart”: Genevieve Gornichec’s debut novel, a tale of revenge against the gods, provokingly subverts Norse mythology. Read the review |
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| | | |  | | Smalltime
By Russell Shorto When you learn that your low-key grandfather had a colorful career as a mid-level Mafia bureaucrat, how much more do you really want to know? Grandpa Russ turns out to have been a shady “supplier of nightlife” on a very local scale, running a sports book and crooked card games. Read the review |
 | | We Own This City
By Justin Fenton They were cops who lived for the job, and they were given a mission to get guns off the streets of Baltimore. But the same detectives who racked up arrests had a way of turning policing into profit—and brutalizing citizens. Could a cancer in the squad room be rooted out? Read the review |
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| Stories in Stones: The historian Edward Gibbon wrote that he conceived his epic account of the fall of the Roman Empire while sitting among the ruins of its onetime capital. Journalist and science-fiction writer Annalee Newitz, who finds the remains of vanished communities similarly thought-provoking, traces the histories of lost worlds—from a city of glorious temples in an Asian jungle to the streets of ancient Pompeii, where one finds a town as bawdy as any corner of the internet. Felipe Fernández-Armesto on “Four Lost Cities” by Annalee Newitz. Read the review |
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| The author, most recently, of “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.” Read the article |
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- Endless Love by Scott Spencer (1979)
- The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1984)
- Nothing Natural by Jenny Diski (1986)
- Bed/Time/Story by Jill Robinson (1974)
- Gordon by Edith Templeton (1966)
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