Shambhala Review by David Starkey Those of us who are not practicing Buddhists, but are still “Zen-curious,” can turn for modest enlightenment to classics like Alan Watts’ The Way of…
Author: David Starkey
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee
Norton Review by David Starkey I bought my copy of Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism after visiting an exhibition at the National Gallery…
10 Best Books of 2024
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…
31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2024 – Alcalá to Zarin
Reviews by David Starkey Every year since 2014, I’ve set aside a couple of months to sit down with what amounts to a long shelf of of poetry published in…
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss
Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…
Playground by Richard Powers
Norton Review by David Starkey In some ways, Richard Powers’ new novel Playground is a double bildungsroman, showing us the youth and early adulthood of Todd Kean—white, a native of…
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Random House Review by David Starkey I honestly don’t know how much I would have enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, if I hadn’t already been familiar with…
Webbed Skies by Melissa Cody
Museu de Arte de São Paulo / KMEC Review by David Starkey Webbed Skies is the monograph accompanying a recent exhibition of Melissa Cody’s weavings at the Museum of Modern…
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City by Richard E. Ocejo
Princeton Review by David Starkey In the conclusion of his new book, Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, Richard Ocejo, a sociology professor at John…