John Leonard

Book critic John Leonard reviews "Cuba: A Journey," journalist Jacobo Timerman's scathing account of everyday life under Castro.

Book critic John Leonard reviews "Two States - One Nation" by Gunther Grass, which collects the author's writings over the decades against German reunification.

Book critic John Leonard reviews the South African author's new epistolary novel, which uses cancer as a metaphor for apartheid. Leonard says it's baffling with a terrible beauty, that spares no one -- including blacks and white liberals.

Book critic John Leonard reviews the fourth, and final installment in John Updike's Rabbit novels, Rabbit at Rest. Leonard says the first book was nearly perfect; this one is too concerned with capturing every aspect of the 1980s -- whether or not those references serve the story.

Book critic John Leonard reviews The General in His Labyrinth, a fictionalized account of the last days of Simon Bolivar. Leonard says there is plenty of magical realism to be found alongside Marquez's strong, socially conscious writing.

Book critic John Leonard reviews the new book by ex-nuns Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, co-written with Jane O'Reilly. Ferraro and Hussey defied the Catholic Church's policies on abortion, birth control, and the ordination of women. Their convictions eventually led them to give up their vows.

John Leonard reviews Geoffrey Wolff's new, semi-autobiographical novel, about a young man's education in Princeton and subsequent life as a privileged adult.

Kurt Vonnegut's new novel is set in 2001 in a radically reconfigured America. The complex, self-referential plot reveals unique insights into the United State's past, says book critic John Leonard. It's Vonnegut's best book in years.

Book critic John Leonard reviews the new novel by Tadeusz Konwicki, which fictionalizes the author's family history in Czarist-era Poland. It's complex narrative anticipates the political upheavals by Stalin and Hitler, and the rise of anti-Semitism.

The new work by archaeologist Charles Pellegrino reconstructs a vision of the ancient Greek world on the island of Thera, where the mythical city of Atlantis was said to have been. Book critic John Leonard says it's fascinating to think how technology and civilization would have advanced had that area not been destroyed by a volcano.