Knopf | Illinois Review by David Starkey Some striking similarities emerge between the subjects of Willard Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt and Dana Greene’s…
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The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors by Jackie Bennett, with photographs by Richard Hanson
Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey Does a writer need a garden to write? Obviously not, but The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors suggests that having…
Fascism in America: Past and Present, Edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward
Cambridge University Press Review by Brian Tanguay One of the animating questions in the essays that comprise Fascism in America is whether or not our national political arrangement has reached…
The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly
Pegasus Review by Walter Cummins Not only could the title of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, be appropriate for Helena Kelly’s exposé of the many biographical deceptions she has…
The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
Pantheon Review by David Starkey Helen Garner is having a well-deserved moment. The eighty-one-year-old author, renowned in her native Australia, but until recently barely known in the U.S., has benefited…
Bloom: On Becoming an Artist Later in Life by Janice Mason Steeves
Friesen Review by Linda Lappin Painter and art educator Janice Mason Steeves came to art quite by chance late in life after a friend invited her to attend a pottery…
Creature by Marsha de la O
Pittsburgh Review by George Yatchisin Ventura, California-based poet Marsha de la O knows of fire, force of destruction and engine of rebirth. Consider the poem “The Afterlife of Flames,” from…
Tremor: A Novel by Teju Cole
Random House Review by Walter Cummins I read Tremor as the story of all that is taking place in the activities and in the mind of Tunde, Teju Cole’s protagonist,…
The Boy with the Star Tattoo by Talia Carner
William Morrow Review by Walter Cummins Talia Carner personifies the turmoil of mid twentieth-century history in The Boy with the Star Tattoo by interweaving three narratives featuring individuals who struggle…
The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric, Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future by Peter Gleick
Public Affairs Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge by Erica Gies Chicago Press Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate by David Sedlak…