Belknap / Harvard Review by David Starkey “Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of…
Category: Featured Reviews
Use for a few selected items.
1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times by Ross Benes
University Press of Kansas Review Brian Tanguay Although I lived through the era of their ascendancy, I never understood the immense popularity of professional wrestling, Jerry Springer, the Beanie Baby…
Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons by Brittany Friedman
University of North Carolina Press Review by Brian Tanguay Scholar Brittany Friedman begins Carceral Apartheid with a black and white photograph of her maternal grandmother. The year is 1939, and…
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay Elif Shafak writes with her heart as much as her imagination. Her eye and ear seem to gravitate toward characters whose stories are rarely told:…
American Mother: A Life Reclaimed by Colum McCann and Diane Foley
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay James Foley was the first American citizen executed by ISIS. He was decapitated in Northern Syria in August 2014. The act was filmed. The perpetrators…
Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North by Kathleen Lippa
Dundurn Press Review by Brian Tanguay What most impressed me about Arctic Predator, journalist Kathleen Lippa’s book about the crimes of notorious sexual predator Edward Horne, is her determination to investigate…
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In early March 2022, at Berenike, a barren spot on the shores of the Red Sea, a team of archaeologists made several remarkable finds. From…
10 Best Books of 2024
The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As…
31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2024 – Alcalá to Zarin
Reviews by David Starkey Every year since 2014, I’ve set aside a couple of months to sit down with what amounts to a long shelf of of poetry published in…