Book Reviews from 2025

I liked this even more than The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

The autobiography of Joe Bonanno, formerly the head of one of New York's criminal "Five Families." Worth reading for extensive discussion of how the Sicilian Tradition is not limited to the cliches of mob movies -- as long as you believe Bonanno, who is surely not a disinterested reteller of historical events.

This detective novel is both a gritty murder mystery and a beautiful realization of an alternate-universe version of Sitka, Alaska -- a Jewish Sitka that never was, a post-Holocaust outpost of Yiddishkeit at the frozen edge of the world. The setting is potent; one could easily set a series of books here. The ending seemed to come on a little too quickly, but I tend to see that in most crime or thriller novels, so I wonder if it's just me.

The title is absolutely killer. Pity it wasn't used on a better book.

A World Lit Only By Fire is about the transition from the medieval world to the Renaissance one, focusing on how the rise of Protestantism shattered the medieval worldview's unchanging conceptions of the world and man's place in it. The book offers a reasonably detailed account of the Reformation, and how its flames were fanned by anticlericalism and budding nationalism, but I don't think the author does a great job even staking out a thesis, let alone defending one. He couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he was explaining history or merely describing it.

This is the best novel I have ever read.

I should have loved this book. It was recommended by a dear friend, and the elevator pitch is pure Maxwell bait: "In the 17th century, an Italian is captured by Turks and forced to work for their rulers".

But by God, the writing is dull, dull, dull. 80-90% of this slim book is the main character endlessly pontificating or having pointless arguments with the Turk who is his tutor, student, and jailer. It's not quite as bad as The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt, another mind-melting bore with a navel-gazing, daydreaming, self-hating protagonist. But it's friggin' close, and in some cases it offends more: the setup for the most predictable twist in the world is not so much telegraphed as repeatedly blasted into your face.

A solid spy thriller by a master of the genre. This is the second book I've read by Le Carre, the other being his famous The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Naturally, he knows his spy tradecraft, the details of which are used to great effect in portraying a competent protagonist drawn into events larger than himself, by no fault of his own.

Le Carre also deftly makes reveals that kept me turning pages til the end. As with Came in from the Cold, the ending happens suddenly and all at once. As in that other great spy thriller, The Day of the Jackal, the full strength of the protagonist's plan is kept secret from the reader till the very end, yet (also as in Jackal) it's all very logical: Le Carre doesn't cheat the reader by pulling things out of his rear end.

Barzun's magnum opus illustrates 500 years of European cultural history, with details focused primarily on the lives, works, and philosophies of key players great and small. He asserts in plain but erudite language what people thought and why they thought it, and how ideas and movements related to contemporary culture and influenced major events. His observations continually return to major themes, including individualism, self-consciousness, emancipation, analysis, reductivism and primitivism, which he uses to characterize change and continuity among works of art, social movements, and strains of thought. Interlude chapters step back from the personal perspectives to show what it was like to live in key cities during the time periods when they were most prominent on the world stage.