Tom Rider's Reviews

The authors, both with the British Museum in London, discuss the changing conventions of depicting the body in Greek sculpture from the early classical age through the Hellenistic centuries to the Greco-Roman period. Many of the sculptures in this wonderfully illustrated book are Roman copies of earlier classical Greek sculpture; the Romans much admired the [...]

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Barry Werth’s Banquet at Delmonico’s has captured the nineteenth-century world of the public intellectual. The 1870s and ‘80s are the heyday of the public lecture and hence an important venue for the discussion of Charles Darwin’s theories. The book is a collective biography of those on both sides of the Atlantic who popularized Darwinianism amongst [...]

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On July 1, 1916 British and French armies launched a coordinated offense against German positions along the River Somme in Picardy, northern France. The battle would continue off and on until November when rain turned the countryside into mud. In that first day British casualties were 19,000 dead and another 37,600 wounded and missing. French [...]

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This biography combines the life of a remarkable individual from the ancient world and good writing. Cleopatra was the last Ptolemy to rule Egypt before it became a province of the Roman Empire in the reign of Caesar Augustus (Octavian). Her illustrious ancestor Ptolemy I Soter had become the governor of Egypt upon the death [...]

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Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1887. After competing in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, he was hailed as the “finest living, all-around athlete in the world.” The next year he joined a major league baseball team and then Triple A teams for another dozen years. Jim played for a professional [...]

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First Nights explores how five famous musical compositions were heard and experienced at their premiers. That involves Thomas Kelly’s describing the musical culture of the time, the techniques and instruments available, and the concert halls. Modern instruments and orchestration now provide opportunities to performers of these pieces not then available. Kelly believes, however, that something [...]

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