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.…
Author: David Starkey
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…
The Talk by Darrin Bell
Henry Holt Review by David Starkey Darrin Bell’s The Talk joins James Spooner’s The High Desert as the second superb memoir published within a twelve month’s span about growing up…
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Knopf Review by David Starkey The cover of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is well-chosen. It shows the short, solid and tanned torso of Pablo Picasso beneath the three-dimensional…
Passing for White
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo (Simon and Schuster), The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (Berkeley), “Passing” from…
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
Viking Review by David Starkey “It was the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says the aide to the great man, “how this guy could spread the bunk and make the…