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…
Author: David Starkey
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…
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
Simon & Schuster Review by David Starkey What in the world are they thinking, those uniformed museum guards standing in the corners of the galleries, looking alternately stern and bored,…
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House Review by David Starkey Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel Romanic Comedy really is a romantic comedy, complete with lovers who initially seem mismatched, complications and hurdles, and an ending…
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
Knopf Review by David Starkey Early in Lorrie Moore’s new novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the protagonist, Finn, notes that while white schizophrenics are allowed…
Blue Skies by T. C. Boyle
(Liveright) Review by David Starkey Even the grimmest climate change novels usually contain a glimmer of humor, and books like Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible contain passages that are downright…