BOOK REVIEWS & RECOMENDATIONS
I love books. I have an extensive library and read voraciously. Years ago I started reviewing books for Amazon. I stopped doing that because I realized I was feeding a machine that was undermining local booksellers and compromising a way of life. My practice today is to almost exclusively buy books through local bookstores. If I read a review of a book I like or someone recommends something interesting, I email the title to the owner of my local book shop, Jessica's Book Nook, and he orders it for me. I pay a little more for a book - but believe me it is worth it.
The goal of this section is to direct people interested in Shelley and his circle to books of interest. I will try to review as many of them as I can, but in other instances I may simply point you to books of outstanding importance that fall into the category of essential reading.
Alexander Larman's "Byron's Women" and the conjoined but contrasting myths of Shelley and Byron
Alexander Larman's new book Byron's Women is just out in paperback and you need to buy it; now. In what may be one of the best written blogs I have come across in a very long time, Larman encapsulates his thesis; and he does not mince words:
The greatest falsehood propagated about Byron is that he loved women. On the contrary, his attitude towards those in his life was mainly a mixture of contempt, violence and lordly dismissal.
In the pages of his book it would appear that we finally we have someone speaking truth to power and by power I mean what Larman calls the "Byron establishment"; an establishment which he asserts has been "permeated by a lazy misogyny for decades".