Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey In The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century, Owen Hopkins, Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University, focuses on three key…
Author: David Starkey
Wildflowers of North America by the National Audubon Society
Knopf Review by David Starkey It’s spring here in Coastal California, and the atmospheric rivers that deluged our state have resulted in an abundance of wildflowers, which makes the publication…
The Intimate City: Walking New York by Michael Kimmelman
(Penguin) Review by David Starkey At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, it was not uncommon for people to pause and imagine a project they might carry out that would…
Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby
(Riverhead) Review by David Starkey The cover of Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius features a Victorian top hat hanging on the tip of the penis-like…
Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Neal Bodenheimer and Emily Timberlake
(Abrams) Review by George Yatchisin What Marseilles is to the Mediterranean, New Orleans is to the Caribbean, a savory meeting place where countries and cultures, priests and pirates, hopeful and…
Concrete Poetry: A 21st-century Anthology edited by Nancy Perloff
(Reaktion) Review by David Starkey Compare an accomplished short poem of several hundred characters—say Seamus Heaney’s “Wedding Day”—with just about any concrete poem of the same length, and you’ll quickly…
Haven by Emma Donoghue
(Little, Brown and Company) Review by David Starkey The opening of Haven (the title’s similarity to “heaven” is hardly accidental) has the feel of a classic adventure story. A well-traveled,…
The High Desert: A Memoir by James Spooner
Review by David Starkey On a grand scale, not much happens in The High Desert, James Spooner’s graphic memoir of his freshman year at Apple Valley High School, which he…
Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout
Review by David Starkey I’m not quite sure why I love Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Lucy by the Sea, as well as its predecessor, Oh William! as much as I…
The Passenger and Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy
Review by David Starkey I have always thought of the novels of Cormac McCarthy as ultra-violent adventure stories written in an over-the-top style that’s sometimes mesmerizing and sometimes a bit…