As a critic, you encounter all kinds of books. Some are just awful. Some are worthy, but dull. A few are good; some books even entertain. Then there are books you live in. (They don’t come along very often.) Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest is one of those kind of books. As thrilling as any adventure story, and grounded in awe-inspiring research, this magnificent account of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s and the doomed attempts of George Mallory to scale the world’s tallest mountain is one of the best books I have ever reviewed.

Two cheers for the critic! Superannuated (perhaps, but still hanging on by a thread), woefully underpaid (most definitely), and charged with the thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens, the critic, says Francis Wheen in a recent Financial Times piece, can still tempt us to risk something different.

HBO’s new documentary perfectly captures the pathos and ugliness of one of chess’s all-time greats. It’s a fine compliment to Frank Brady’s new Fischer bio, which I reviewed earlier this year in The Boston Globe.

National Journal has just published a fine and deeply depressing piece about the toll bin Laden has taken on the US economy. It’s a necessary counterpoint to all the chest thumping of the past week. .

Reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the comment from the fellow out in Washington state who would not shave his beard until bin Laden was killed or captured: “No one really won,” he said, newly shaven. “Everybody’s been hurt in all of this.”

The Guardian’s travel section just launched a nifty series of interactive city guides. Here’s a top ten I wrote on the best outdoor activities in New York. Get your inner urban woodsman (or woman) on right here in the 5 boroughs….

Believe it or not, Germany’s last financial obligation from the First World War will be fulfilled this Sunday . With a final installment of a staggering reparations bill, Germany will have met the terms laid down by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles. This is the way wars end— not with a bang, but an entry in the ledger book.

In a fascinating piece about the relationship between two quintessential British institutions—the Times Literary Supplement and spying—the historian Keith Jeffery looks at how various TLS hands reviewed spy fiction and memoirs, genres which emerged in the years after WWI. Not surprisingly, the British Secret Intelligence Service was none too happy when ex-employees wanted to tell their story. But there was often not much to tell—Somerset Maugham, who worked as spy during the war, observed that the work of an agent was “on the whole extremely monotonous,” and produced much that was “uncommonly useless.” Maugham’s fictionalized versions of his experiences, which he collected in his Ashenden tales, hardly compare to the over the top action of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels. Indeed, the TLS reviewer, praising Maugham with faint damns, concluded that his work was “only moderately entertaining.”

Then there was the paranoid former Chief of Secret Service who outlined his memoir thus: “The book will be quarto size, bound in red, top-edge gilt, subtitled ‘The Indiscretions of the CSS.’ It will have four hundred pages, all blank.”

P.G. Wodehouse is best known for his creations Jeeves and Wooster, yet, as D.J. Taylor writes in a recent issue of the TLS, Wodehouse forged his reputation on the adventures of Ronald (formerly Rupert) Psmith, a “supercharged, upper-class version of the “masher” or “knut” of the Edwardian comic paper.”

Penguin Books is celebrating its 75th birthday this year. Here’s a piece I wrote in 2006 about Penguin founder Allen Lane, and the enduring genius of his imprint’s always eye-catching designs. (The look of this website is an homage to Penguin’s classic orange and black livery).

Peggy Olson is shaping up to be one of the most interesting characters on Mad Men, but little Sally Draper is giving her a run for the money. Played by the startlingly precocious Kiernan Shipka, Sally is by turns manipulative and vulnerable, deeply cunning but profoundly isolated. Don and Betty may not mean to poison her with their shortcomings, but they do, and, whatever her flaws, Sally is now a fully fledged member of Mad Men’s distinguished pantheon of complex, misunderstood women—except that she’s a ten year old girl. (As for the utterly self-possessed Shipka, how many child actors would explain, as she did in an interview at the 2010 Emmy Awards , that they “try to be method on the set”?) We’re rooting for you, Sally.