My wife has been reading Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle to me during trips, and we finished it just as we approached the last exit from the highway, on Monday. I'd read it twice before (we used my old Doubleday Anchor edition, which still survives) but it had been decades ago.

When people ask me for good original books ( Read more... )

         When I was in the Smithsonian last year, the American History part, I found Ship in the bookstore. It's a lavishly illustrated "history" of ships, of the kind that I generally pass over, because the pictures are wonderful but the text is often amateur. But this was a Smithsonian imprint, and a DK imprint (and they've turned out some ( Read more... )