Books High and Low

  I don't always "get" poetry, but I loved this collection of poems by Alta published in 1989 by Shameless Hussy Press. A co-w...

  Anthony Bourdain's 2000 memoir about his more than (at that point) 20 years in the restaurant industry is fascinating but also a littl...

Overall, I enjoyed this fifth book in this series about Libertus, a former enslaved British man who was freed and made a Roman citizen when ...

  I really liked this touching and heartfelt memoir by NPR reporter Nina Totenberg about her decades long friendship with Supreme Court Just...

  I loved this novel about two motherless girls who grow up together in a small Louisiana town. Niecy was raised by her aunt, and Annie by h...

  In the 7th book in the Slow Horses series, the work records of all of the agents at Slough House have disappeared and several of their for...

While I'm still enjoying this series, I think this is one of the weaker offerings. Doctor Gaius Ruso has left the Roman army in Britain ...

  I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did. It's been thoroughly reviewed and rated on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, wi...

  The sixth book in Mick Herron's Slow Horses series opens with two of the Slough House agents killed, although they aren't named. T...

  This is a fascinating memoir by Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who served in many roles throughout the former Soviet Union and who e...

I enjoyed this self-portrait by Josh Shapiro, the current governor of Pennsylvania and someone widely believed to be a potential contender f...

  I found this a tough book to read because nothing ever goes right for the protagonist, Able God, or anyone else in the book, for that matt...

  In this Hercule Poirot mystery from 1937, wealthy spinster Emily Arundell writes to Poirot with concerns that someone in her family is try...

  I really enjoyed this collection of 19 essays about moss. Subjects include much of the author's research into mosses' reproduction...

This series of novels about MI5's set of outcasts known as "Slow Horses" just gets better and better. In this fifth book in th...

  Agatha Christie pokes fun at herself in this first novel featuring the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver. Ms. Oliver is one of eight guests at...

Standing by the wall  is a collection of five novellas in the Slow Horses series published between 2015 and 2022. They introduce some new ch...

  Libertus, a former slave and current mosaic artist, has developed a reputation for solving murders, and in this fourth installment of Rose...

  In the 4th novel in the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron, one of the main characters disappears after his grandfather, who has dementia, ...

I liked this book a lot. The main character is hired to be the companion of a man who was rescued from the 19th century just before he was k...

I really enjoyed this memoir by journalist Clarissa Ward, currently the chief international correspondent for CNN. She studied comparative l...

This is a thoughtful and intimate look at the short presidential run of Kamala Harris in 2024. The chapters are numbered by how many days ar...

I really enjoyed this sixth book in Ruth Downie's Medicus series about a doctor in the Roman army in the 2nd century. In this book Gaius...

The narrator of  Murder in Mesopotamia  is Nurse Amy Leatherman who has traveled to Mesopotamia to accompany a patient, planning to travel h...

This is a very good fictionalized examination of Rosalind Franklin's career as a scientist in 1940s and 1950s England and France. She ca...

This is the third novel in the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. It continues the story of a bunch of exiled MI5 officers who are assigned ...

This is an interesting and heartfelt memoir by a woman who has founded three bookstores that operate not only as bookstores but also as comm...

I really loved this fantasy about a woman who gets a new husband every time he goes into the attic. She tries out some of the husbands for a...

In this second book in Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mystery series, both Inspector Wexford and his DI Mike Burdon take a back seat i...

In this book, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth shares her own and others' research about what makes some...