Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins The title of this collection is appropriate for each of its nine stories. In some literal brawls take place, the combatants physically scarred. In others…
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The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes
Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins The image of Alfred Tennyson I’ve carried for decades goes back to the childhood card game of Authors that depicts him with a stately continence…
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 by Ian Buruma
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins While I was reading Stay Alive, bombs—many more powerful than those of World War II, others delivered by drones—were falling on a number of cities—Kyiv,…
Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Honeysuckle is one of the strangest novels I’ve read in a long while, and by strange I mean in the sense of unsettling and rarely…
Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay A fundamental political question lies at the heart of Billionaire Backlash by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee: who makes the rules? Is it individual billionaires…
The ABCs of California’s Native Bees by Krystle Hickman
Heyday Review by Brian Tanguay I always enjoy learning new facts about my home state. Prior to reading The ABCs of California’s Native Bees, I had no idea that California…
Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Andrew Burstein
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay It’s fair to say that Thomas Jefferson fascinates historians. The sheer number of biographies of America’s third president is staggering, and one might wonder what…
News and Notes
All the latest, from our editors and contributors 4/8/26: Read editor Brian Tanguay’s new post, “America: Land of Fears and Nightmares,” in Working-Class Scribbler. 3/20/26: Read editor David Starkey’s interview…
California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature by John Freeman
Heyday Review by David Starkey When we at the California Review of Books heard there was a new collection of book reviews about California writers, we were interested in learning…
A Ribbon for Your Hair: Loss. More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On by Stephen Policoff
Heliotrope Review by Lisa Del Rosso A Ribbon for Your Hair: Loss. More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On by Stephen Policoff, is a memoir about the loss of…