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…
Category: Memoir & Biography
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…
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr. by Marion Orr
University of North Carolina Press Review by Brian Tanguay By the mid-1970s, Charles Diggs Jr. was arguably one of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives. The most…
Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza
Norton Review by David Starkey Living in the Present with John Prine, the new book by Tom Piazza, seems like it shouldn’t work. Piazza’s encounters with Prine were too scattered…
Talking All Night: The New York Poets – Interviews, Photographs, Letters by Mark Hillringhouse
Serving House Review by David Starkey In an interview with Mark Hillringhouse, poet Anne Waldman responds to a question about the literary scene with a quote that could apply to…
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt
Norton Review by David Starkey It’s appropriate that the painting on the cover of Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival may, or…
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous, Scandalous Story of Aimee Semple McPherson by Claire Hoffman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by George Yatchisin Why and how masses of people fall under the thrall of a magnetic person are the kinds of questions that sadly keep…