Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay The late Daniel Ellsberg is perhaps the most famous whistle-blower in American history. When he copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — a…
Category: Memoir & Biography
When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented Comedy by David Margolick
Schocken Review by Walter Cummins The hardest I’ve ever laughed took place more than fifty years ago. David Margolick’s book brought it all back in full hysterics, the experience of…
Transformed by India: A Life by Stephen P. Huyler
Pippa Rann Review by Brian Tanguay I was intrigued by Stephen P. Huyler’s description of his early travels, long before smartphones, GPS, language translation, and social media. Travel was more…
I Found Myself… The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz
New Directions Review by David Starkey On October 15, 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was on his daily walk in Cairo. “Mahfouz’s…
Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin
Doubleday Review by David Starkey 2025 was the year of the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it was also the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s first great album:…
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins by Sonny Rollins, Edited by Sam V.H. Reese
New York Review Review by Walter Cummins I’ve been listening to Sonny Rollins’ saxophone for decades, including one live performance with bad acoustics that he still managed to overcome, and…
The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog
Penguin Review by George Yatchisin Who better than Werner Herzog, the Bavarian mad genius, to take us on a heady time-travelling exploration on what truth might mean/be/permit? The Future of…
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law by Terese Svoboda
OR Books Review by Walter Cummins Terese Svoboda could have begun the title of her latest book with a number of other famous or familiar names—Goebbels, Goering, Martha Gellhorn, H.V.…
10 Best Books of 2025
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…