Helvitiq Review by David Starkey Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, a novel about a male Elizabethan aristocrat who, at the age of 100, turns into a woman, has inspired a…
Author: David Starkey
The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding by Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf Review by David Starkey There’s something depressing about the fact that renowned historian Joseph J. Ellis felt the need to write The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the…
Vigil by George Saunders
Random House Review by Walter Cummins It’s the language and telling that makes Vigil such a pleasure to read. While the subject is death and the act of dying, the…
The Society by Karen Winn
Dutton Review by Walter Cummins While reading Karen Winn’s new novel, The Society, a vivid memory of a 1935 James Thurber cartoon kept popping into my head. That one has…
The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750 by Ingrid D. Rowland
MIT Press Review by David Starkey The Lies of the Artists is a clever title for a book with the subtitle Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750, but it seems to…
I Found Myself… The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz
New Directions Review by David Starkey On October 15, 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was on his daily walk in Cairo. “Mahfouz’s…
Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin
Doubleday Review by David Starkey 2025 was the year of the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it was also the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s first great album:…
10 Best Books of 2025
The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As…
The Best Poetry Books of 2025
Reviews by David Starkey As I have every year since 2014, in 2025 I set aside a couple of months to peruse the year’s books of poetry–at least those books…