Magnificent, sublime, magical -- I lack the words for it.  My favorite author after Proust himself, and this is, in my opinion, his virtuoso performance.

Southeast Asia from the perspective of the besotted westerner; he conveys the languid seductive charm of that part of the world. The chapter on the Khmer Rouge conquest of Phnom Penh is brilliant.

Top-notch baseball fiction; it may indeed take fiction to bring Christy Mathewson and Hal Chase back to their opposite, but equally mythic, lives.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that even the historical indifferent might find this a page-turning depiction of both a culture and of one of the turning points of western civilization.

No one ever made murder seem so elegantly cool, so refinedly British, as Dame Agatha.  One of her finer selections that I put off reading till adulthood.