Page by Page: Book Reviews

Working against sometimes clunky prose, but with an eye on posterity, Washington D.C.’s most (in)famous mayor tells his story of power, the temptations of power, and his legacy forgotten amidst scandal.

The majesty, intelligence, pettiness and prowess of the film world’s famous boy genius and might-have-been is revealed—appetite and all—in the tape recorded pages of Henry Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson.

Despite moments of tone-deafness, the graphic novel treatment of Django animates the ethical puzzle of Tarantino’s film with static vigor, and color to spare.

“Abnormally Normal” is the leading label of Melissa Joan Hart’s new autobiography, but it’s mostly normally abnormal in ways we’ve come to expect from Hollywood starlets.

Watch Everything explores the career and times of U.S. District Judge Charles A. Shaw as one of three brothers growing up in racially-charged St. Louis, when personal tenacity and collective caution where a way of life.

You may think you know the story behind Auguste Bartholdi’s creation of the Statue of Liberty, but you don’t know the whole story until you read Elizabeth Mitchell’s Liberty’s Torch.

Imperial Japan and the history of psychiatry through an American doctor merge and meld in A Curious Madness.

Crimes against humanity get their own diagnosis in Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and The Psychiatrist, a unique tour through both WWII and the history of mental health.

In The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley is that rare scribe deft enough to move from personal anecdote, to policy, case study, and back again.

Rose George drenches the reader in her ocean-wide chronicle of sea-faring commerce, past and present, but her book’s meandering passages warn you in advance to don a lifejacket.