Norton Review by David Starkey Back in 2018, I gave a rave review to Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. I was quite taken with her poet’s takes…
Category: Memoir & Biography
The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom
Chicago Review by David Starkey Is Albert Camus’s most famous novel, The Stranger, a bit too programmatic? Is The Plague, which I reviewed during COVID, a bit too long? Is…
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…
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…
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…
Truth And Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope by Daniel Ellsberg, Edited by Michael Ellsberg and Jan R. Thomas
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…
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:…