Baum on Books

It’s always challenging to write about a group of short stories: What to mention? In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new collection called Truthtelling, “Pickup” deserves notice because, like the last story in the book, about a page turner of musical scores, it references music, a special love, the author says, that has always informed her writing style.

British author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, is best known to American audiences through his popular PBS series Foyle’s War and Midsommer Murders. He’s now out with a new mystery novel. It’s the sequel to his popular work, Magpie Murders. And it’s a doozy!

Scott Turow’s been called the king of legal thriller writers – with 30 million books in print, many made into memorable movies, but as his latest work shows, The Last Trial, he should be called a “novelist.” In the old-fashioned, big theme sense of the word. His books -- suspenseful, complex, filled with heady content and dramatic exchanges –are always timely, and none more so than The Last Trial, given the race to discover a vaccine against Covid-19.

Still high on the list of the world’s 100 best novels, Joseph Conrad’s haunting “Heart of Darkness” continues to fascinate, mystify, and attract adaptors. Although Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 award-winning film “Apocalypse Now,” starring Marlon Brando is, arguably, the most imaginative of the lot—moving Conrad’s brooding and inscrutable Congo tale to Vietnam—the 1902 novella inspired earlier films (Boris Karloff as the charismatic Kurtz in 1958, John Malkovich in 1993). “Heart of Darkness” has

No way you’re not going to keep reading a book with this opening line: “The captain wore a see-through dress.” Especially when the title of the book is “Scandal on Plum Island” and the author, Marian Lindberg, a journalist and attorney, notes on the cover that it’s a true story. This historical account, however, is not about conspirators’ favorite subject, germ warfare, on this windswept island in Gardiners Bay that’s still closed to the public, but about allegations of homosexuality against a

Yet another go at the Founding Fathers? Well, to judge from historian and documentary filmmaker Tom Shachtman’s new book, “The Founding Fortunes,” Yes and No. Subtitled “How the Wealthy Paid for and Profited from America’s Revolution,” Shachtman’s analysis of the years 1763-1813 merits a yes because he does revisit some of the big names and battles of the day. But the answer is also no because “The Founding Fortunes” is not just another look at Colonial and post-Colonial politics and economics.

He didn’t at first appreciate the scare and chose to stay in the crowded city. And he hadn’t at the start stockpiled food or self-isolated or realized the extent of the contagion. But he did come to acknowledge the horror and the “brutal courage” of those who tried to help. “He” was Daniel Defoe. The time was 1722. The occasion, the publication of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” three years after Robinson Crusoe. In the “Journal” Defoe is looking back 57 years to when The Great Plague hit London

It’s a matter of fact that between 1840 and 1882 there were eight assassination attempts on the life of Queen Victoria, but in his suspenseful novel “The Darwin Affair,” Tim Mason adds a ninth, in 1860, and makes the target Prince Albert. The date is important: it’s just months after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” and concomitant with the Oxford University Museum debate on evolution featuring those famous antagonists – biologist and anthropologist Thomas Huxley

Before there was the Algonquin Round Table in New York in the ‘20s, a lunch group of literary bon vivants whose often quotable put downs would become famous, there was – and STILL IS – The Club, a unique London tavern assembly of intellectuals, started in 1764, that included some of the most dazzling verbal sharpshooters of the day. Their extraordinary, wide-ranging conversations, passionate arguments and often hilarious provocations and rejoinders have now been captured by the award-winning

Tory Bilski could have called her well-written and witty memoir of riding horses in northern Iceland “Wild Horses of the Midnight Sun,” but in naming it “Wild Horses of the Summer Sun,” shows her writing creds: the alliteration effectively plays on the popular image many people associate with this starkly beautiful land of lupine fields and black volcanic sand banks – not to mention Johnny Mercer’s lyrics in that old jazz standard, “Midnight Sun.” Like Mercer, Bilski evokes a nostalgic warmth