Amy Lyford’s interpretive biography "Exquisite Dreams" covers artist Dorothea Tanning’s life and remarkable range of work. Born in 1910, Tanning recalled her Galesburg,... Read More

Boria Sax’s "Enchanted Forests" spurs the imagination with its wide-ranging examination of literature, folklore, and visual art related to forests and their creatures. This... Read More

Visually stunning and astonishing in scope, Stephen A. Harris’s "The Beauty of the Flower" is a history of botanical illustration that has all the makings of a classic... Read More

Arguing that pirates did more than lawlessly pillage the high seas, Rebecca Simon’s fascinating book The Pirates’ Code reveals their rules of engagement—and the steep... Read More

William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye’s "Venus" is a comprehensive introduction to historical and current research into Venus, as well as its representations in popular... Read More

Captivating and graced with exquisite illustrations, Boria Sax’s "Avian Illuminations" blends history, folklore, art, literature, and ornithology to explain why birds are such... Read More

In "The Invention of Oscar Wilde", Nicholas Frankel examines Wilde’s life from a new perspective. Oscar Wilde is an icon to both writers and the LGBTQ+ community. He assumed... Read More

P. Christiaan Klieger’s "Tibet" is a complex, storied survey of the mountainous homeland of the Dalai Lama. Once a powerful empire, Tibet has struggled for centuries to... Read More

The French are acknowledged to have the world’s most elegant, sophisticated cuisine, but how did this reputation and style of cooking evolve? In "Savoir-Faire", Maryann Tebben... Read More

Much we can intuit when we know what someone et—Cezanne and Picasso revered the perfectly prepared omelette, and here’s their recipes to prove it. Beautiful food art, quirky... Read More

A nation’s public monuments are at bottom permanent and revealing political propaganda-witness the Statue of Liberty or the St. Louis Arch. Michalski, an art historian at the... Read More