War, in Panorama
/How could they do it, those young men who, with every reason to live, walked deliberately into machine-gun fire? Joe Sacco gives us a panoramic view of the horror, the labor, and the losses of WWI.
Read MoreA Man Could Stand Up: On Downton Abbey’s Second Season
/Unlike the soap operas with which it is often dismissively aligned, Downton Abbey is defined by change rather than stasis - by its beautifully produced attention to social evolution.
Read MoreTime Wounds All Heels
/In Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child the renown of a minor English poet balloons and distorts in each succeeding decade after his death
Read More‘Some fights are bigger than others’
/Brothers take opposing sides in World War One, in a gripping biography that reveals the history and politics of America's role in the conflict.
Read MoreSophistication and Recklessness: Patrick Leigh Fermor
/With Patrick Leigh Fermor's death, the world lost a gracious host, a tireless traveller, and one of the best prose stylists of the 20th century. We pause to appreciate him.
Read MoreA Raging Appetite
/Food writing today requires guts - often quite literally. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir transcends gross-out theatrics to portray a life in food, from abandonment to something like fulfillment.
Read MoreThe Greatness that was Downton
/Julian Fellowes' "Downton Abbey" was shot in a castle, but it may have a nearer relationship to "Mad Men" than "Brideshead Revisited." Joanna Scutts tracks the evolution of the British costume drama.
Read MoreNo Sign of Horror in the Heavens
/Mary Borden’s long-forgotten 1929 memoir of World War I, The Forbidden Zone, takes its readers into the harrowing world of a front-line trauma nurse. Joanna Scutts joins her in the trenches and assesses the damage.
Read MoreThe Least Glamorous Spy
/Today the name Mata Hari evokes a villainess in a James Bond movie. Yet, as Joanna Scutts discovers, if you wipe away the makeup from the myth, you uncover a far sadder and more complex tale.
Read MoreThe Life of the Tail Gunner
/In her new novel Day, A.L. Kennedy places a World War II veteran on the set of a war movie; unfortunately, Joanna Scutts writes, the characters of her book are not much more dimensional than the movie set.
Read MoreThe Uncertainty Principle
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Joanna Scutts reviews Soldier’s Heart by West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, whose memoir accomplishes the impressive feat of finding common ground between Army officers and English majors.
Read MoreThe Dream After the Nightmare
/When crises like 9/11 erupt, says Susan Faludi, America’s women wind up in lockdown. Joanna Scutts finds the national unconscious as unbalanced as ever in The Terror Dream.
Read MorePeer Review: Onion Skins and Grass Cuttings
/In our regular feature, Joanna Scutts is judge and jury over the reviewers of Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion, who rather too frequently forgot they were supposed to be considering a book.
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