Riverhead Review by David Starkey In some respects, Lauren Groff’s latest novel is an old-fashioned adventure tale. It begins with a teen girl, “bony and childish small” but quick, smart…
Author: David Starkey
The Lichen Museum by A. Laurie Palmer
Minnesota Review by David Starkey Readers thinking that lichen don’t sound like the most scintillating topic for a book have a valid concern. After all, these organisms created by the…
Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by George Yatchisin Will Hermes admits he’s on a fool’s errand with the opening quote of the preface to his 529 page biography of Lou…
Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt by Willard Spiegelman | Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet by Dana Greene
Knopf | Illinois Review by David Starkey Some striking similarities emerge between the subjects of Willard Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt and Dana Greene’s…
The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors by Jackie Bennett, with photographs by Richard Hanson
Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey Does a writer need a garden to write? Obviously not, but The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors suggests that having…
The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
Pantheon Review by David Starkey Helen Garner is having a well-deserved moment. The eighty-one-year-old author, renowned in her native Australia, but until recently barely known in the U.S., has benefited…
California Review of Books – 10 Best Books of 2023
The following list was decided after much consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journals’ most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin.…
Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
Knopf Review by David Starkey I’ve refrained from watching the new Ken Burns PBS documentary The American Buffalo to better assess its companion volume by Burns and Dayton Duncan, Blood…
The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser
Liveright Review by David Starkey Last month, I was lucky enough to be in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This was my first visit to that august institution, so I…