Man of letters Public intellectual Cultural critic Feuilletoniste Whatever he was exactly they don rsquo t make them like that anymore and the more rsquo s the pity Once upon a time writers like Edmund Wilson Mary McCarthy Irving Howe Alfred Kazin or even George Orwell armed only with the

Over 70 years ago in 1934 the prize-winning biographer and historian Matthew Josephson published an eye-opening best seller entitled The Robber Barons Through prodigious research reports of congressional committees and ldquo inquiries rdquo done by state legislatures as key sources and gifted

Readers of this absorbing book will learn a great deal about a politically ambitious English immigrant named Daniel Horsmanden who as a judge on New York rsquo s Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the transmutation of a sequence of robberies and suspicious fires in 1741 into a vast conspiracy

In this second collection by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Mary Oliver containing 42 new poems the contents run in reverse chronological order the most recent ones first just the way a curriculum vitae starts with the latest accomplishments Publishers must fear a flagging of int

In Blessed Among All Women Robert Ellsberg publisher of Orbis Books has compiled another unorthodox hagiography The book records the lives of 136 holy women Their stories eloquently told in short entries are grouped according to the virtues of the Beatitudes an arrangement that reflects Ells

Not only did Fra Giovanni paint like an angel; he was, in his personal life, an angel himself. The friar’s “angelic” style and “rare and perfect talent,” Vasari informs us, were the result of a “simple and devout life.”