George Jonas

Running the Rapids is a fine title for a book, but it could also be an entry for the Queen’s Plate in the great memoir-sweepstakes—say, a filly sired by the famous Derby winner Running to Paradise. If Kildare Dobbs’s autobiography were such a pony, she would have two things going for her right out of the starting…

I started reading Michael André Bernstein’s Conspirators with a sense of anticipation. Promise is intrinsic to a complex tale composed by a highly literate writer of evident erudition and historical sense, a tale that is set in a familiar milieu and exciting times, and is offered in the context of a thriller, complete with love and intrigue (to borrow the title of Schiller’s…